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unlikelyplaces's review against another edition
dark
emotional
3.0
I listened to Savage Her Reply by this author last year and it was one of my favourites of the year so I was excited when I saw that my library had the audio for this one as well but I probably should have predicted that this one wouldn’t work as well for me.
I would describe this as somewhere in between a short story and poetry collection of retellings of classic fairytales. Now I know for a lot of people that sounds like the dream and to those people I would absolutely recommend this book.
However for me, although I love mythology retellings, for some reason I’m really not a fan of fairytale retellings (which I realise does not make much sense, I can’t explain it) and I often struggle with an overly poetic writing style.
However for me, although I love mythology retellings, for some reason I’m really not a fan of fairytale retellings (which I realise does not make much sense, I can’t explain it) and I often struggle with an overly poetic writing style.
I think my main issue with this was that I didn’t always understand the point the stories were trying to make. The book has obvious feminist themes and in some of the stories the author’s message was clear, but there were a few that either I just missed it or it was unclear what was happening and what the point was. This wasn’t helped by the fact that I didn’t know all of the original stories so when the author was taking just one character or a snippet of the story, I didn’t have the context for it which made it difficult to follow at times.
This book did cover a wide range of stories and a lot of them have very heavy and difficult subject matter (as do many of the original tales) and there were definitely some that I liked more than others. Please do check for trigger warnings if you feel like you need to as there are many.
I would recommend this book to anyone who likes fairytale retellings, especially with a feminist lens, and who likes poetic writing. This was definitely a case of “it’s a me problem” but I actually think this was very well written and would work for a lot of people.
Content warnings (I’m not sure if I’ve got all of them as I didn’t follow all of the stories very well so there may be some missing from this list): Gore, sxual abuse, child abuse, domestic abuse, incst, binge eating, alcoholism
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore, Eating disorder, and Incest
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