Fairy tales have always been one of my favourite things to read, and I’ll eat up retellings of them like nobody’s business. So it should be fairly apparent that I was excited to read lesbian retellings of popular fairy tales. Fairy tales! Modern retellings! Lesbians! That’s a perfect formula for me.
The tales in this book are The Princess and the Pea, The Swan Princess, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, and The Frog Prince(ss). It’s a good selection and the storytelling is engaging, and beyond that, they aren’t to-the-letter adaptations. The retellings follow the general meaning of the original tales (a woman cursed to be a swan half her life, a girl cursed at birth to die by pricking her finger) but they’re retold in interesting and unique ways. In The Princess and the Pea, the rich character is a CEO rather than a member of royality; in Beauty and the Beast the beautiful character (in this case, Baker) is a business owner as well. Despite familiarity with each of these tales, I found myself wanting more and more to know exactly how each story would develop and unfold. My personal favorite was The Swan Princess, as it had a surreal and melancholy aesthetic to it that I really enjoyed.
While the storytelling was engaging, one thing I was very disappointed by in this collection is how badly it needs editing. The formatting needs work, and there are many, many typos and grammatical errors– so many that it honestly took away from my enjoyment of the stories. The tone of the writing is solid and fits the fairy tale format well, solemn and interesting without being too involved in nitty-gritty details, so I think with editing this collection would be a fantastic read that I could happily recommend.
