This is not the retelling of some well-known tale, but the reader will find it familiar nonetheless, recognizing the structure and the motifs. A daughter leaves her child of an unknown father to be raised by her own mother: a universal tale, as old as stories are old, and as contemporary as a social worker’s client list, full of so many women who had thought they were finished with the burden of raising their children, forced to begin all over again with the grandchildren left on their hands.
Because this is a fairy tale, the child’s father is of course a sort of king, and of course he comes to take her to his own kingdom. And of course the grandmother will not give her up. But there are, as she knows, rules to this kind of thing. She may refuse to relinquish the child, but there will come a day when the choice will no longer be hers. And Fur is a difficult child, who grows up wild and uncontrollable—who in many ways does not really seem to belong to this world.
Prineas makes effective use of our familiarity with the patterns of fairy tales, the way the rules work. But the roles are not static; over the years, as the crow man returns again to demand the child, we see a slowly evolving relationship of wary respect between him and the grandmother.
The story is not perfect: an important revelation of the grandmother’s own power is a bit jarring, as late in the story as it comes, and Fur’s final speech does not ring true. And the pedant [such as this reviewer] might object that Fur is not in fact a changeling, for whom the rules would be quite different. These are minor objections, however, to what is otherwise a satisfying addition to the body of fairy tale variations.