While beginning to read the story, I immediately detected a major difference between the way this story was written and how fairy tales usually are; this story clearly states that it is in fact a fairy tale – that it is a magical story, and even though the characters have unfamiliar names, they lead lives that exist for no other purpose than to teach us things, just like any other magical character.
A modern retelling of an old Vietnamese tale, the story of the mosquito teaches us to let go of the past. Life takes a natural order and we should not try to force things beyond their natural end.
What i found interesting was the way was the tone in which the author retold it. It was very informal and seemed more like a conversation than a story. I think this made the story more relatable in a sense – something a reader could better understand and absorb, take seriously rather than dismiss it as a bedtime story.
Srishti, I’m going to caution you about relying on the word “relatable” to explain things –it’s so subjective that it doesn’t really mean much.
This is just a start of a big thought (or what could be a big thought), but to me, the most interesting part is when you start unspooling the implications of this “conversational” voice and how it establishes a relationship with the reader —can you identify the tricks that create this assumed intimacy? did it make you aware of a formality in traditional fairy tales? or the opposite: aware of fairy tale/folk tale origins in the oral story?