A FAIRY TALE UNIVERSE IN…

Fairy tales are works that spark creative imaginations of children and convey diverse life experiences through the messages in them. Fairy tales are a gift to humans from the childhood times of humankind, and every child finds, in some way, himself/herself in the fairy tales s/he reads or listens to. Besides the anonymous folk tales, original and modern tales by authors also make an impression on children’s worlds.

A collection of tales by Mavisel Yener awaits the children in Storier Grandpa’s chest of tales in the Taffy Appleland. Tellers of the olden tales would travel from land to land, compose bits and pieces of dreams and lives they collect and create new tales; then, once again, they would travel from land to land telling their tales to the people. In The Taffy Appleland, which contains tales of our age with a touch of sci-fi, the purple bearded Storier Grandpa sometimes hopes on the wings of a cloud, sometimes in his invisible car traveling from one planet to another, fromone dream to another and fills his chest with marvelous tales, and shares them with the children of this world and other planets.

Storier Grandpa, in wisdom, watches the weaknesses and wickedness peculiar to mankind and shows them to his young readers. For example, he neither tells the tale of an angry and grumpy man who fights even with his own shadow nor those over greedy, jealous, and hateful. Sometimes with his words of wisdom in a blue envelope, Storier Grandpa reaches children: “At times the thing that was hoped for and the thing that come to be may be more than light years apart. Every disappointing event holds a gift within,” says Storier Grandpa filling hopeless hearts with light.

I have to tell you that my inner child is rather touched by the tale named The Storyteller of the Black Hole. In this black tale, that stars off as “Once upon a ceaseless time of ceaselessness, in the middle of the deep blue sky, there was an endless black hole,” our Storier Grandpa goes to visit the Storyteller of the Black Hole who keeps calling for the grandpa in his dreams. He sees that the black hole is a negative universe, in which all the knowledge disappears, and fairy tales fade away. The Storyteller of the Black Hole has no tales to tell; so, he ceaselessly calls for storytellers and learns tales from them. The Storyteller of the Black Hole even attempts to write a black book by copying other storytellers’ tales. But in the end, Storier Grandpa bids farewell with words of wisdom to the Storyteller of the Black Hole.

The Taffy Appleland offers a feast of tales with the words of wisdom that broadens the readers’ horizon and guides them in life; and its Storier Grandpa who approaches to mankind’s conflicting circumstances with tolerance and sympathy. Grandpa’s magnificent chest of tales waits to be discovered by young readers to visit many a dreams.