According to Yolen, "I had begun this story because I loved the old fairy tales that open with a king and queen who want a child, tales like 'Snow White.'" The pattern and tone of "The Face in the Cloth" are those of a fairy tale. Fairy tales offer the opportunity to deal with broad human issues concisely, pulling together significant elements for close examination. Where a scholarly disquisition might take volumes to cover the issues related to a daughter carrying the image of her mother with her or a novel covering the same issues might be so long and diffuse as to bog down in its ideas, a fairy tale allows for the use of commonly recognized symbols that carry the burdens of large ideas. For instance, the daughter carrying an image of her mother.....
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