Storybook Worlds Made Real: Essays on the Places Inspired by Children's Narratives ed. by Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark I. West

Abstract

Reviewed by: Storybook Worlds Made Real: Essays on the Places Inspired by Children's Narratives ed. by Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark I. West Jackie Young (bio) Storybook Worlds Made Real: Essays on the Places Inspired by Children's Narratives. Edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark I. West. McFarland, 2022. Think back to your favorite story book. I easily imagine myself in my grandparents' house with my favorite copy of The Lord of The Rings, in their yard pretending my yellow lab was a Ring Wraith chasing after me. I embarrassingly fabricated images of Aragorn professing his love to me in the alcove of their living room, yet my eyes only saw a meadow in the heart of Rivendale. Story worlds have the magical ability of allowing the mind to remove itself from the mundane practices of everyday life and thrust us into what once seemed unimaginable. Any of us Fairytale and Fantasy aficionados know how well these tales burn into our hearts and provide us with countless hours of daydreaming material, but it is the potential of greatness that these stories open up for our often times limited waking life. Storybooks Made Real, a compilation of essays surrounding the inceptions and creation of story world landmarks, beautifully highlights the life breathed into some of our most beloved tales, through the world of amusement parks and tourist attractions. Throughout this collection, each scholar—or more appropriately each pilgrim—transports you to a realm of transformation. From the magical English gardens breathing life back into Beatrix Potter, to the grandiose world of Hogwarts, each essay represents powerful narratives of landscape transformation that finds itself in the midst of the tension between the sacred and profane, modern and old world, emphasizing a respect and delicate care for the natural landscapes and communities that engrain their culture in these story worlds. Each author relates their own experiences of these story worlds, acting as our guides and walking readers through a journey that transports us through time and space. One of the most successful aspects of this collection of essays is the emphasis that each author puts on the transformative aspect of these attractions. With many of these essays outlining the inception of these parks, the landscape is often "a rocky landscape" (West), "virtually inaccessible" (Jackson), or down an "unpaved two-rut road" (Rollin). These descriptions, just to name a few, seemingly create magical realms right before our eyes and mimic a desire many of us have in a post-pandemic world for [End Page 350] the mundane and dreary to become otherworldly and tantalizing. Focusing on these aspects of transformation successfully melds both old and new worlds together, unavoidably bringing joy and a sense of conflict drawn from the corruptions of a capitalistic focused society. Storybook worlds, as much as they are for our own nostalgia and connection to a natural world, serve as a money-making machine for industries that prey upon the scarcity of these literary spaces. This collection does well to address the issues that commodification and mass tourism has, not only on the transformation of the stories themselves, but the positive and negative effects that are brought to the communities around these storybook worlds. Each essay takes care to humanize the creation of these worlds, assuring readers that these places do in fact coexist with individuals whose lives forever changed by the stories that have frozen their communities in time, or pushed them into the world of corporate modernity. In looking at this tension, many authors of these essays also examine the question of whether or not these story worlds transform the original meaning and intention of the stories themselves. Authors like Patkin explore the "Disneyfication" of beloved stories, stories that privilege nature and a disconnect from the chaos that metropolitan industrialism brings, yet now find themselves stripped of their didactic properties in favor of easy to digest, emotionally pandering media. As Patkin states in "Winnie the Pooh: Resisting Commodification," "Disneyfication typically alters the original theme and characters of a story, distorts the narrative structure and changes the cultural and geographic setting" (59). This process of commercialization, outlined in many of these essays, prompts us to walk the...