1 star
| I was pretty disappointed with this one. I’ll start off by saying that I really enjoy fairy tale retellings and read quite a few ( Wicked, TaleSpins, Ever After High, Wolves and Witches). I love when people put their own twist on a classic, when they recreate a well-known character or completely reimagine a story. However, I don’t think this book was marketed as what it really was. My understanding was that it was a book of fairy tale retellings. I think a more realistic description is a book of poems and short stories that vaguely, kind of, sort of, mostly relate in some way to some form of fairy tale or mythology. I use such loose terms because some of the works had no basis in any outside work except referencing a name in one line such as Hera. Really this has a flimsy theme of fairy tales, but I would not call it a book of retellings. On top of that, I just didn’t really like the stories or poems. There were some that had a good idea such as “Waking Beauty”. However, the writing was clunky and awkward. The idea was interesting, but the story felt more like a plot summary. It didn’t really engage the reader. I loved the idea of it, but the story was just not well-written. As this was my favorite in the book, it is telling of the quality of the writing. I was also sad to see that most of the references seemed to pull from the Disney movies, rather than the actual stories themselves. When Gaston and Jafar popped up, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Honestly, I was surprised to see the reference to Hercules murdering his family. Like, oh so you do know there is more than the Disney movies, do you? Where is the rest of that in the book? Also, while you can obviously change aspects of the stories when you retell them, displaying a complete lack of understanding of the original story makes for a clumsy retelling. The entire reason Jack’s mother wants him to sell the cow is because it stopped giving milk so they need money to buy food. So to say he gave it to an old lady so her grandchildren could at least have milk doesn’t even make sense and shows that you just threw ideas into a rough understanding of something without actually looking at the real story. The reasonWicked is so amazing, besides the fact it’s well-written, creative, and engaging, is that it pulls so much from the source material and refits it in a new way. Just making up details is lazy and leaves the reader feeling less than enthused. It was nice to have illustrations to break up the text. I don’t think they really added much to the stories, but it was a nice break. In all honestly, I am surprised this book only took me 6 days to finish. While reading it, I felt like it dragged on and often put it aside for something more engaging. I really like reading (and writing) fairy tale retellings, but this was one of my least favorites. Very disappointed in this read. Goodreads |