5 stars
A) I love interpretations of fairy tales. B) I am fascinated by Tan’s stunning artistic style.
It’s no wonder I loved this book. Each spread showcases a sculpture along with a scene from the fairy tale that inspired it. The photos themselves are stunning, perfectly lit, sometimes with engaging backgrounds, sometimes allowing the sculptures to speak for themselves.
And the sculptures… wow. The playfulness of size, texture, and color was fantastic. There is weight to each piece that makes the viewer want to hold it and touch it to feel all it has to say. Neil Gaiman says it well in his forward in stating that the sculptures “feel primal, as if they were made in a long-ago age of the world, when the stories were first being shaped” (p. 2). These pieces wonderfully capture the essence of each tale, sometimes with their own eerie twist.
I really enjoyed the general dark aesthetic. There is a nice variety in the stories presented. Some are classics like “Cinderella” and “Rapunzel”, some I was vaguely aware of, and others I’d never heard of before and was happy to experience in this collection.
At the end, there is a brief summary of each story, which I found very helpful for the ones I was unfamiliar with.
A breathtaking collection filled with elements both eerie and delightful, haunting and beautiful. Tan creates a space that is both otherworldly and home, a place where the untouchable and tactile collide, where magic and reality meet.