Book Review: "Telling the Seasons" by Martin Maudsley

Full Title: Telling the Seasons: Stories, Celebrations and Folklore Around the Year by Martin Maudsley

Just because folk horror is my all-time favourite subgenre does not mean I don't enjoy reading the plain stories of the old folk traditions that don't happen to be as horrific. Folk stories are fascinating to me - passed down through oral traditions of hundreds of years and nobody really knows exactly where they came from.

They are a testament to the human condition and our requirement to tell each other information in narratives and anecdotes, in tall tales and fairy stories. It is something that has gone on since humans first walked the earth in the caves in the depths of the ground all the way through to Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare and more. Folk stories have a certain power though, that authored stories do not. Folk stories have been universally accepted as a known tale. For example: Little Red Riding Hood is a story that goes back further than simply Charles Perrault and yet, it is universally acknowledged that it is a tale for a purpose and it is a tale that everyone remembers.

First of all, this book is split into months of the year. Each of these years has a story in it that reads like a children's folktale but very obviously has some deeper meaning about the month it corresponds to. For example: the story in 'January' is about a young girl called Mary who encounters a wicked stepmother and whilst her father is away in the winter, Mary is made by her stepmother to collect primroses and stawberries from the snow. Knowing they don't grow there, Mary becomes afraid as she sets out. But she meets some great and kind magical beings named after certain months to help her. Obviously, it ends with the wicked stepmother being defeated in her plans though I will not tell you how.

After being split into months of the year with various stories to accompany them, another thing about these chapters is that they are complete with facts and histories regarding the months of the year. Again, I will use January as an example - not just because it is the first month of the year but also because my birthday is in January.

January, as we already know and as the book delightfully writes, comes from the term 'Janus' - the Roman god you may have seen with two faces, one facing one way and the other facing the opposite. The book states this and then goes on to talk about the different things we can find in January like the 12th day of Christmas, also known as the 'Epiphany' and also how it prepares us for the year to come. We look at what folks back then believed about January and we get a recipe, yes you read that correctly, a recipe, of some delicious food to accompany the season/month.

Alongside this, Allison Legg provides some very detailed and incredible illustrations to this book to make it less like simply a short story anthology and more like a kind of almanac. A brilliant addition to the text, these images are of things like candles, rabbits and decorations of all sorts. With title parts that almost look handwritten, you really can't go wrong when you're reading this when it comes to getting that folk feeling. Everything about this book should do the trick to sink you into the atmosphere and let you immerse yourself in the folk-art style of the book.

I thought that this book was a very cleverly styled and brilliantly curated text. The author very obviously put a lot of work into styling the anthology so that the reader could get a multi-level experience of the folk genre - making it inviting for all. For example: we not only have the nature of the stories, but we also have how artistic the book is and we have the recipes we get at the end. All of these make a huge difference to the experience of the book and I personally feel that without these additions it would just by another run-of-the-mill anthology. It is brilliantly written and absolutely beautiful. I recommend this to you all.