REVIEW

The five flash fictions in Kathryn Kulpa’s For Every Tower, A Princess cast a dreamlike spell, luring you with folklore into magical realms you won’t want to leave.

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Kulpa’s lyrical prose and extraordinary worldbuilding guide the reader through a New England landscape strewn with stone paths that twist and turn and end in mysterious glens. Pick the right one, and you might come across an old fairy ring. At least, that’s what some of the locals call it. Others insist a witch lived there once. And wouldn’t this theory explain the bundles of twine-tied sticks found about the forest?

In these stories, a collection of young female narrators delves into myth—stories about Black Bread Lake, about the ruins of round houses, about what might happen if you follow the owl’s call one night and let the stars tuck you to sleep under the moon’s blue blanket. Kulpa’s narrators skim the line between once and future worlds with such longing that the reader cannot help but desire to discover what magic might slumber in their own lives. Might we, too, unearth hidden powers if we chanced upon hand-drawn maps that led down roads with forgotten names to waters known only in stories passed down from grandmothers? For there are answers, deep in the forest, for those who know where to look. And oh, can we please stay and search a bit longer?

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But all books (like spells and dreams) must end. We must wake up. And sometimes, as the narrator of the final story River of Dreams realizes, we awake knowing more about our world, about so-called reality, than those who never dreamed at all. So, when the narrator in River of Dreams admonishes her reality-loving brother saying, “You never understood why my bookshelves bulged, why I’d read the same books over and over,” the reader cannot help but recognize a kindred spirit. And when she asks in the book’s penultimate paragraph: “Who’d pick Kansas over Oz?” We cannot help but nod amen. Yet, at this point, we can (literally) see the end of the book. We know we must wake. Kulpa, thankfully, has prepared us for this eventuality. She’s taught us the spell: we need only flip the pages back to become enchanted all over again.

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BOOK DETAILS

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For Every Tower, A Princess can be purchased here.

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Published by Porkbelly Press. The volume is nearly square at 5.25”x 6” and includes 10 pages of prose. The book is hand-made with stunning wraparound cover art by artist Mary Carroll. The binding, hand-sewn. The paper is deliciously smooth and the volume delightfully pocket-sized. Porkbelly Press pulls out all the stops with their packaging as well. Books arrive wrapped and adorned with a calligraphed name tag—a joyous gift in the mail.

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