I love retellings, especially fairy tale retellings. I have a whole shelf on Goodreads dedicated to retellings and parodies. However, this one was kind of a let down. With big names like Neil Gaiman, Nancy Farmer, and Gregory Maguire, I thought I was in for an amazing trip into fairy tale retelling-dom.

Unfortunately, most of the stories fell flat for me. Many of the authors took most of the magic out of the stories, creating a version of the story set in modern or quasi-modern times. This essentially took everything I love about fairy tales out of the actual fairy tale. I love reading about far off places in times long past with elements of strange magic. So these modern, realistic tales kind of took all the fun out of reading fairy tales.

I did like a few of the pieces. Nancy Farmer’s “Falada: The Goose Girl’s Horse” was my favorite. I liked the changes she made to the original story. I also thought Michael Cadnum’s “Mrs. Big” and Garth Nix’s “Hansel’s Eyes” had unique and interesting retellings. And Neil Gaiman’s “Instructions” was a cute way of tying together a bunch of stories.

But many of the stories just felt a little boring to me. Not enough fairies in said fairy tales.

Not sure if it’s because it was written 18 years ago or if the authors just tried simplifying their stories too much for their target audience, but I did not like this book as much as I thought I would. It was still decent with some interesting ideas in it so I still gave it 3 stars. Unique mash-up of sci-fi, fantasy, and realism.

Goodreads