Fairy tales are a staple of life for many book lovers. They give us hope, warn us of the dangers in ignoring wise advice, and teach us that with just a bit of courage and bravery we can over come anything.... or so we've been led to believe.
I have admittedly never read anything by Jane Yolen. I was attracted to this collection because of the title, primarily. When I realized it was a short story collection, I was even more intrigued. Short stories are my favorite to write, you can do so much with short stories and still leave the reader just as heart broken or enthralled as you could with a 50,000 word novel.
How to Fracture a Fairy Tale
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ From Goodreads :
Fantasy legend Jane Yolen presents a wide-ranging offering of fractured fairy tales. Yolen fractures the classics to reveal their crystalline secrets, holding them to the light and presenting them entirely transformed; where a spinner of straw into gold becomes a money-changer and the big bad wolf retires to a nursing home. Rediscover the tales you once knew, rewritten and refined for the world we now live in―or a much better version of it.
Format: egalley ARC
Publisher: Tachyon
The Breakdown
I have to start with the forward (introduction). Meyers is a Queen in her own right, and reading her intro to the stories was a pleasant, easy read that made me even more eager to jump into the collection.
Over all, I really enjoyed the collection. Yolen's stories were well thought out. It was a collection of stories, most easily identifiable, with each story not exactly as it should be. I expected each story to be based on a different tale, much like a typical collection of fairy tales, but that is not the case. While there truly are about a thousand different ways you can spin the story of Cinderella, the repetitive nature of those types of stories did bog down the global feel of the book. Several times I felt like I was reading something I'd already read, simply because the basis was the same. This could be because I read them all in one sitting. Maybe if broken up over the course of a few days, it would not have seemed redundant.
ALL THAT ASIDE.... These stories. WOW. The original ideas were flowing, the metaphors were strong, and the puns -- yes I picked up on puns -- were spot on. Yolen took tales that we thought we knew and shed new light onto them. From a stepmother swallow up by the earth, to a Godmother that decided who lived and who died - there is literally something for everyone. The characters were well written and dynamic, even in such a short amount of characters. Each story created it's own world, a distinct place - different from the last. It was beautiful and heartbreaking all at once. Each story gave me a shred of hope, and many yanked that hope and drug it deep down into the belly of hell. I could not get enough of this collection, and I was telling people about specific stories (Particularly Godmother Death) for weeks afterwards.
Yolen's brilliant use of analog and world building left me breathless, and some times in awe of the investment I'd made in such a short time. While I have read some complaints of works going over reader's heads, I found that not as true for me. There were some that really made me think about what Yolen was saying, but over all - I felt like the stories connected solidly. I loved that there was an index of notes about each story in the back of the book. This was immensely helpful when sorting out my own feelings about each story.
I give this collection a 4/5 stars! I did not care for the repetition, and I do want to warn people that it is not sunshine and rainbows. Some of this is dark, and twisted. But, if this is your thing **It's totally mine!**, then dive in and enjoy!!
**Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me an egalley in exchange for an honest review**
Comentários