Saturday 3 March 2018

Non-Fiction Book Review - 'Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles' by Taisia Kitaiskaia

Dear Baba Yaga,

I want to review your advice book and don't know where to begin. How do I find the right way, to convey your mystic yet caustic, strange yet so simple, otherworldly advice to everyday mortals?

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BABA YAGA:

Everyone, everything, mortal or otherwise, gets stuck in things, like a stump. In a dense, noisy wood. Yr a crow -- prevented from feeling the wind and air of the sky ) with a birds eye view of the world, by fearing heights. Yr brain and heart know to write in yr own unfurnished words; but yr thinkings fly about, buzzing and snuffling, stifling yr breath and creativity, and yr can't get anything done. Clear yr mind ) like a pool, a slate mirror into which yr see yrself, no ripples, only sun, and the exciting ripples yr want to convey will surface.

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In otherworlds, GET ON WITH IT, STUPID.



'Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles' - A witchy, gnarly, no-comforts, no-cups-of-tea, slightly twisted little advice book to come back to again and again; for guidance as well as interpreting the answers to life's many complexities from the folklore Russian witch in the woods with the house on chicken legs. I'd always wanted something like this, something directly related to the famous wise old crone, Baba Yaga, and here we go. She makes quite the agony aunt you've never encountered before. Thanks, Taisia Kitaiskaia.

'Ask Baba Yaga' is strange, and you'll like it for it, for I find it to be far better, and far more honest - not to mention more feminist - than any advice columns in women's magazines I've ever read.

Celebrating morally-ambiguous, totally unconventional, independent witches, I give this creature a moon score of:

Final Score: 4/5

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