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 around with her is a very big idea&mdash...