Girl Who Sat by the Ashes

She called herself Maid-alone, and so she was: a goat-girl on the high rocky places, unnamed and unseen by the household that barely remembered she existed. When her father brings home a new wife and daughters, the girl who once had a name finds herself further banished still, until the only fire warm enough to sit by is the ashes of the hearth. But ash-girls have a way of transforming. Through cunning, through patience, through something that might be magic or might be simply the stubbornness of the overlooked, this girl will find her way to her own name and her own crown. Pádraic Colum, a master of the Irish Literary Revival, retells this ancient Northern tale with the rough-hewn simplicity it demands. This is not the softened Cinderella of later tellings but something older and stranger: a story about the girl on the margins who was always more than she appeared. Colum's prose has the cadence of oral tradition, the kind of tale that was meant to be spoken aloud in firelight. It is short enough to read in an evening, but it will stay with you far longer.