AD – Today on the blog we welcome author Marc Nash, with his Promotional Post for his new book ‘Stories We Tell Our Children‘, which was released on 15th April 2021. Keep scrolling to find out more, read a few snippets from his book, and watch his YouTube video.

Blisteringly bleak yet witty and imbued with kind-hearted curiosity, Stories We Tell Our Children weaves a series of darkly inventive interlinked modern fables into a complex world where children learn to survive and adapt through the tales they are told. It considers how our young are transformed by the words they are fed, words that are often insubstantial and misleading, leaving them hungry for truth as they sift through the scraps left by those whose aim should be to nourish them.

But often such storytellers reflexively hand down the stories they themselves were told, without much reflection, or shirk their responsibilities altogether leaving their children exposed to the encroachment of narratives from society which may not always have children’s best interest at heart. Can the wicked witches and wolves in grandma’s clothes stand for online predators, data miners, hackers, identity thieves and faceless algorithms?

What Reviewers’ are Saying

– A great, unique concept for a book

– I feel like I have been tumbled about in whirlpool of language and ideas.

– I found this book to be a definitive play on words and it made me question myself on the stories that we tell our children.

Snippets from Stories We Tell Our Children

Since the girls snapped surreptitious pictures of Stella on their phones and sent them to friends, or uploaded them to social media cabal and covens unknown, ballet didn’t seem to be curing them of their phone addiction now did it?

“What colour is… custard?”
“Yellow! Urgh! I don’t like custard!”
“I know you don’t poppet. But it still has a colour.” But not an innate warning colour, like some poisonous animals cautioning of their toxicity. Not a perilous colour that is, until some human animal prefixes it with a venomous modifier, like ‘cowardy custard’ in the nursery; or ‘yellow chicken’ in the school playground; yellowbelly on the army assault course; and yellow star in the concentration camps.

China dolls and Bisques with their life-like skin tones cast in porcelain. Rag dolls and Cabbage Patch Kids. Baby dolls and the ubiquitous Ken and Barbie. Dolls that cry for their feed and dolls that wet themselves enjoining your further attention. Dolls that speak if you poke their stomachs. Wooden, plastic and textiled. The unjointed and those with movable limbs. Matrioshkas and poppets. Funerary figures and fertility dolls in the psychologist’s consulting room. A police doll mascot in the detective’s office, like you see in those clip joints for tourists. Lugubrious fixed smile plastered across its face.

Share your thoughts on ‘Stories We Tell Our Children’ in the comment section below!