Get Your Hands On The Dog Who Spoke And More Mayan Folktales: El Perro Que Habló Y Más Cuentos Mayas Devised By James D. Sexton Provided As Textbook

don't know how to review this,

The stories were not what I expected, They sounded so contemporary in nature, I don't really know what I expected though, and that has me wanting to examine my expectations, I don't know if it's the way the editor said, "so and so told me this story in" and the stories would say, "this happened to my cousin's nephew.
. . " Maybe that just changed the way I interpreted the stories because I heard each as though it really was about the person's distant relative, instead of hearing that reference to a distant relative as a storytelling convention.
I think I heard each story as though it was happening recently, instead of some otherworldly timeless fairytale land as I may have expected, I didn't read the notes as I read the stories, It's hard for me when the notes are in the back of the book and they disrupt the narrative flow, After reading all of the stories I started reading the notes, I feel like the notes are helpful in framing the stories as folktales because they identify themes, they explain how character names are consistent or inconsistent over different tellingsthey explain how there are different versions of similar stories.
It would be nice to go back and read the stories again after having read the notes, Also I think I just want to take some time to think about how I've come to define what a folktale is in my mind,

A lot of the stories dealt with people coming back from the dead, or with ghosts being dangerous and scary characters, Cemetaries do not feel like safe places in the story, being alone at night seems very dangerous, People in the stories often turn into animals at night,

So, I guess I'm just confused by what "folktale" means if it can include real historical figures from a notso distant past, I guess I'm not sure if the authors were relaying stories that had been passed down for generations, or if this was a book of stories that the storytellers had themselves written.
That might have been explained, but it wasn't clear to me,

I do feel like the stories frequently left me with a sad or ominous feeling, I don't know what to make of that, I got to meet Don Pedro at his home near Lake Atitlan four years ago, He's a very kind man, In James Sexton's earlier books he's known by the pseudonym Ignacio Bizarro Upjan, In the delightful Mayan folktale The Dog Who Spoke, we learn what happens when a dogs master magically transforms into

a dogman who reasons like a man but acts like a dog.
This and the other Mayan folktales in this bilingual collection brim with the enchanting creativity of rural Guatemalas oral culture, In addition to stories about ghosts and humans turning into animals, the volume also offers humorous yarns, Hailing from the Lake Atitlán region in the Guatemalan highlands, these tales reflect the dynamics of, and conflicts between, Guatemalas Indian, Ladino, and white cultures, The animals, humans, and supernatural forces that figure in these stories represent Mayan cultural values, social mores, and history, James D. Sexton and Fredy RodríguezMejía allow the thirtythree stories to speak for themselvesfirst in the original Spanish and then in English translations that maintain the meaning and rural inflection of the originals.
Available in print for the first time, with a glossary of Indian and Spanish terms, these Guatemalan folktales represent generations of transmitted oral culture that is fast disappearing and deserves a wider audience.
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