Aside from a healthy book diet of children's comics and stories, I also grew up devouring fairy tales. It's usually normal for kids to do so; but aside from that, in my case, nostalgia also played a role in my fascination with these stories.
We used to live in a small compound in Pasay City where I had my immediate relatives as neighbors. Inside my
lolo's (grandfather) home was a small library of sorts housing a modest collection of hard leather-bound titles, a remnant of my mom and her sibling's childhood days. I was around 4 or 5 years old when I discovered these books and although I still had yet to learn to read, I'd visit the room again and again, just looking at the wonderful pictures and smelling their musty old scents.
Our old home was a wooden, post-war dwelling and as expected, eventually succumbed to the wrath of termites. Among the casualties were my beloved books.
Alice in Wonderland was actually the first to go. The others slowly, and painfully, experienced a similar fate.
Out of all the titles in that old room, I was only able to save one; a collection of
Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales that have since been in my possession ever since.
Thus, did my love for fairy tales began, which eventually led me to purchase this book --
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales written by various contemporary fiction writers and edited by Kate Bernheimer.
