A sweet, wonderful, educational and relevant little subversive fairy tale retelling for kids and adults to read in winter, at Christmas, at any holiday. At any time really. It's a history lesson about workers' rights - and women's rights - that's framed within the perspective of a poor child who has read the original Hans Christian Andersen tale, who can easily identify with the Little Match Girl, being one herself, and who has experienced some fantastical phenomena and dreams too.
But she won't let her story end tragically.Bridie Sweeney isn't a saintly, too-good-for-this-earth tragic heroine. She is proactive. She is determined. A survivor urchin. Her life won't be for the rich and well-off to feel sadness and pity for her, and then forget about and move on with their privileged existence, comforted in the knowledge that the status quo is intact. She doesn't want to die, quietly, in a fantasy, and out of everyone else's way. She wants to take action.
Match girls - match people - were real people. They actually existed, not just in the fairy tale. They had names and voices.
Bridie has a name, and a voice.
She wants to help others, including her mother and little brother, who also work in matches in some capacity, and are suffering for it under cruel and inhumane working conditions, and company abuse. She wants to help the impoverished women working in the literally poisonous match factory in London. She wants to take a stand, and fight for a better life for herself, her family, and other people like her.
She wishes to strike back.
By doing things like organising a protest...
'The Little Match Girl Strikes Back' is a quick day-read, with nice symbolic black-and-grey-and-red illustrations by Lauren Child, inspired by real photographs of the London match factory worker protests in the late 1800s. A lot of these photos are of poor children. The ending is pretty much a history account, moving swiftly alongside Bridie's story. The last few pages are another "dream" or "fantasy" or "vision" of hers, in the flame of a match. It shows a future, a happier time in her life, that she helped to make happen, and how much she can still do for others, for the world, right then. It is beautiful and almost perfect.
I do not like how the book very briefly gives us a sympathetic policeman - not a character, just a copper who whispers he secretly agrees with the women workers and wants them to be treated better. No police or similar authority figures in positions of power want to stop them, nor harm them. In a book about human rights and protests and driving change for the marginalised and disadvantaged and downtrodden. In a book published in this day and age. It is dishonest, disheartening, disappointing, especially in a children's book.
However, it is the only real flaw I can legit give 'The Little Match Girl Strikes Back'. It also has animals in it, including a cute puppy, so, softie that I am, anything to do with those, anything happening around them, I can forgive.
SPEAK UP!
UNIONISE!
TAKE DOWN CAPITALISM!
For a fast, educational, appealing, engaging, inspiring, hopeful and life affirming read to lift your spirits and faith in humanity at the end of the year, go ahead with 'The Little Match Girl Strikes Back'. I'm surprised the idea hasn't been done years ago.
Final Score: 3.5/5
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