Mary-Claire Helldorfer

Opening on a bitterly cold Christmas Eve, this beautifully-told and gorgeously-illustrated original fairy-tale follows a young boy named Finder who sets out on a journey to see the king. The recent war had ended, but Finder's father had never returned from the fighting, and now he and his mother and sisters were starving. Taking his father's ring, he set out through the snowy woods, determined to obtain help from the monarch his father had served. Becoming lost instead, he meets up with an old blind man, troubled in body and spirit by the wounds of war, who is seeking the magical white stag. Pressed into helping the old man on his quest, Finder is witness to the beauty and majesty of this cervine prey, and the way in which it allows itself to be wounded, in order to offer healing to the old man. Cured by the stag's blood, the old man leads Finder to the king's palace, where a surprise awaits him...

A breathtakingly beautiful picture book, Night of the White Stag was originally published in 1999, and is a title I have been meaning to track down for many years. Yvonne Gilbert, sometimes credited as Anne Yvonne Gilbert, is a masterful artist—her version of Hans Christian Andersen's The Wild Swans is one of my favorite fairy-tale picture books of all time—so I knew I would love the visuals here. In this regard, I was certainly not mistaken, finding her work every bit as enthralling as expected. There is a dreamy, ethereal quality to some of the scenes, that contrasts wonderfully with the melancholy of the tale, in which survivors of terrible trauma struggle through a wintry world. I loved the use of color here, with a palette that is deep and lovely, but also somehow muted, and I was engrossed by the tenderly expressive faces of the human characters, throughout. This is certainly a masterpiece, from a visual perspective, and deserves to be better known.

What I didn't expect, and what elevated Night of the White Stag from a four or four-and-a-half star book to that rare five-star title, was the story, which was more than just a fairy-tale. Author M.C. Helldorfer's brief afterword about her sources mentioned a number of folkloric inspirations, including the legend of St. Eustace, in which a hunting saint pursues a stag with a cross between its horns; as well as medieval literary antecedents such as Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, in which a knight finds consolation after the death of his wife in a vision he has while on a hunt. A more recent source was the 1642 Huron Carol, which offers a Native American retelling of the Nativity Story. This wealth of association is certainly interesting, and I can see how each is tied to important themes in the tale, from the sacred nature of the eponymous stag to the healing offered by a sojourn in the wild. For me, the most powerful was the way in which the stag was clearly a Christ stand-in, given the Christmas Eve setting, and the way in which he was described, with eyes that were "dark and old as night, gentle as love," and the way in which he permitted the old man to harm him.

With a powerful and deeply-felt tale, and artwork that is simply gorgeous, this is a book I would highly recommend! It mystifies me that it seems to have slipped into an undeserved obscurity, and I hope it is soon republished.… (meer)

FROM AMAZON: In a romantic and suspenseful collection of the New York Times bestselling trilogy, love’s unbreakable bonds are put to the test.

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