A strange little piece. It generously inverted some tropes, and played with identity and transformations, and the boy who longs after the girl, the shy boy, is shown to be creepy and awful, and possessive in ways that feel all too familiar.

It was odd and gratifying to look at this tale and see it not as some kind of retelling or reworking of a structure applied to a modern setting, but a kind of new story, a new fairytale that relies on its present day setting. It dredges up pieces of immigrant identities, the straddling of two communities with an ultimate attachment to one over the other, bodily transformation, and the idea of the society that attempts to hold one back. I love how Niffenegger relies on the reader’s familiarity with the trope of the obsessive would-be lover, and how this figure’s persistence is rewarded in other tales, but is here justly thwarted, and whose behavior is shown to be unsettling and unacceptable.

I love how the Raven Girl has to find her own way through the puzzle of herself and her body, and when she is offered a possibility of wings that work, even a very uncertain one, how she accepts the risk if it means she might be able to live comfortably in her own skin.