The Patience Stone and Patience Knife: I like the eerie foreshadowing in this story! The girl is told that her fate is with a dead person (three times by a bird), and her mother is finally so scared for her that she stays home with her... which makes me wonder if the mother will die now. I like the Twilight Zone sense of foreboding. I might base my story off of this one, and maybe just modernize it a little.
At the end of the second part, I was surprised to find that the maiden had "found her fate," instructions to earn a palace, on the body of a dead person. I was expecting her to lose someone close to her.
Toward the end, the young maiden laments all her troubles to a "patience stone," and as she describes how she was given a bad omen, separated from her mother, and deceived by the Arab girl, the stone bubbles up and bursts because it can't handle all the injustice and anguish. I like the idea of using an inanimate object to sort of take on or symbolize the events in a character's life... and even do it literally, like in this story. Maybe my character will have a necklace that grows heavier and heavier as she faces more troubles, and eventually it's too heavy to carry... (that kind of reminds me of The Pilgrim's Progress, actually.)
At the end, the bird that delivered the "terrible omen," flies in singing happily about how the maiden has found her kizmet. I also like this idea; to use something that was symbolized something negative to express something positive at the end of the story.
The Imp of Well: I love this quote, and the word choice: "Nearby lived a woodcutter who, besides his poverty, had nothing but a most cantankerous wife." The "besides his poverty" is funny because most people don't view poverty as something you own, or "possess," like you would a wife (in those days), but to phrase it this way draws attention to it in a clever way, rather than simply saying, "He had nothing."
At first, it bothered me that I didn't know who this first-person omniscient narrator was, but I think it works for the story, kind of like C.S. Lewis did the Narnia (I think it was first person, occasionally, like this one). "Whereon a great uproar ensued, and how either escaped with their life is more than I can understand."
The Imp of Well: I love this quote, and the word choice: "Nearby lived a woodcutter who, besides his poverty, had nothing but a most cantankerous wife." The "besides his poverty" is funny because most people don't view poverty as something you own, or "possess," like you would a wife (in those days), but to phrase it this way draws attention to it in a clever way, rather than simply saying, "He had nothing."
At first, it bothered me that I didn't know who this first-person omniscient narrator was, but I think it works for the story, kind of like C.S. Lewis did the Narnia (I think it was first person, occasionally, like this one). "Whereon a great uproar ensued, and how either escaped with their life is more than I can understand."
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