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Ariel
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Product Description
Ariel is beautiful and magical, a creator of dreams and of mischief.
Sprung from the mind of a dazed sailor shipwrecked in the Bermuda Triangle, she rules half of her enchanted isle, dreaming of the savior from the east who will help her conquer all. When Prospero, a lost mariner, appears on the beach, his young daughter, Miranda, in tow, Ariel entices him with her visions of conquest. Together, she promises, they will defeat the mysterious tribe whose drums beat beyond the island's rain forest. The homesick Prospero struggles to resist Ariel's charms, but he almost falls under her spell when Miranda falls in love with their servant, the island boy Caliban. Ariel wants to march west, Prospero wants to sail east, and daughter Miranda wants to play on the beach with her boyfriend. Their clash comes to a head when Ariel, summoning her full powers, creates a cataclysmic storm that will change their lives and the island forever.
Shakespeare scholar Grace Tiffany looks at the dark side of Shakespeare's The Tempest, investing a female Ariel with tremendous strength. The Tempest takes on new meaning for new readers, as Tiffany explores the imagination's power to transform grief into dangerous dreams.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #776737 in Books
- Published on: 2005-09-01
- Released on: 2005-09-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 240 pages
Editorial Reviews
From School Library Journal
Grade 6-10–The first thing you should know about Ariel is that she's a liar. With this grabber, Tiffany takes the characters from Shakespeare's The Tempest and provides background as to how they get to the point where readers find them in the play. The story spans centuries, beginning with Ariel's birth from the head of a luckless sailor, who was blown across the Atlantic in the fifty-eighth Year of Our Lord and ending with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World. In between, readers meet Caliban, Prospero, Miranda, Antonio, Alonso, Gonzalo, and Ferdinand. While the general story line remains the same, Tiffany alters some of the details in an attempt to show the motives behind the characters' behaviors. For instance, Tinkerbell-like Ariel serves Prospero because she doesn't want the magician to re-imprison her inside the tree where he first found her. Caliban, not literally a monster, walks with a deformed leg because Ariel refused to help his mother during his difficult birth. Miranda befriends him and makes her sexual desires known; thus, he is totally innocent of making improper advances. Other characters include an innocent Alonso; a spoiled, simpering Ferdinand whom Miranda eventually rejects; and a devoted, loving Caliban who wins her heart in the end. The author seems to have structured her ideas in keeping with a revisionist interpretation of the play as a condemnation of European colonialism. The prose is well written and easy to follow, using language that suggests the Bard's poetry. This is a good adjunct to the play and, in the tradition of Robin McKinley's Beauty (HarperCollins, 1978), a means of familiarizing modern-day readers with the heroes of a classic tale, while taking some interesting liberties with the original ideas.–Nancy Menaldi-Scanlan, LaSalle Academy, Providence, RI
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Gr. 9-12. Born from the dreams of a shipwrecked sailor, Ariel, the spirit from Shakespeare's The Tempest, sparks this retelling, or, perhaps more accurately, pretelling. When the sailor dies, Ariel does not, and spends the following centuries shifting from one fantastical form to another, amusing herself in solitude until a very practical and very pregnant woman named Sycorax lands on her island to give birth to Caliban. Sycorax's lack of imagination confounds, then diminishes Ariel until she is weak enough to be imprisoned in a tree for her unwillingness to offer Sycorax any practical assistance. It is there Ariel remains while Caliban grows from infant to child, there that she becomes increasingly enraged. Preying on the dreams of the child, Ariel seeks revenge. By the time Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, arrive on the island, Ariel has found a way to manipulate certain tendencies in the human mind to gain her freedom and increase her power. This lush, lyrical, and elegantly expressive work is a strong mix of solid narrative storytelling, sensitive characterization, and fantasy. A familiarity with The Tempest enriches the reading but is not required, especially as the author so thoroughly liberates the story. An outstanding addition to Shakespearean retellings for strong teen readers. Holly Koelling
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Grace Tiffany is a professor of English literature at Western Michigan University. She is the author of academic texts as well as the novels My Father Had a Daughter: Judith Shakespeare's Tale and Will, both stories of the Bard. Grace Tiffany and her family live in Kalamazoo, Michigan. This is her first novel for young readers.
Customer Reviews
Retell a clasic in colloquial terms
A retelling of the classic The Tempest with a twist! As the sailor Jasper finally finds an island to land after falling overboard he thinks in his dying breath of a beautiful woman of his dreams, she springs from his head and is made real. She waits on the island for another human to come and give her the power to explore the world around her.
http://dailylitmajor.blogspot.com/2008/09/review-ariel-by-grace-tiffany.html
Dreams, Defile, Deception
The first thing you should know about Ariel is that she is a liar, because dreams lie, and she is both dream and maker of dreams. Take that as a warning.
In the Triangle, which is a place of magic, there is a spirit that can see your hopes, desires, and dreams; this spirit's name is Ariel. She was spawned long ago from Jasper, who was a sailor, in 48 A.D. Ariel had been waiting for her champion from the east, to save her from her carpenter ant torture, and help conquer the whole island. When people come to the Triangle though, they do not always listen to Ariel's commands.
I enjoyed this book a lot, and the way it talked about emotions. For example, Ariel illustrated how grief and sadness are not always just on the surface, it is something that is rooted deep within yourself. This book showed raw human feelings, at a level where I could understand them.
I did not like how there where few details about the surroundings in the book. I had to make up a lot of information, like what I thought the setting looked like. Something I think was a bad choice was that Ariel covered hundreds of years rather than just a few. This made reading the book a little more unreal for me, because it is very hard for me to comprehend hundreds of years at the same time.
I would recommend this book to both boys and girls, because Ariel has male and female characters. If you do not have much of an imagination though, this is probably not the right book for you.
A New Perspective
One of the great things about Shakespeare is that you can put one of his plays in any era and it will fit. One of the great things about Grace Tiffany's books is that she is true to Shakespeare while bringing him to life from a new perspective. As with all her other books, this one made me want to go back and reread the original, in this case The Tempest. Ariel is imaginative, creative, humorous and profound; it's a great read.
