A review by ceilisbookshelf
Grim by Christine Johnson

4.0

This is a delightful collection of 17 dark YA fairytale retelling short stories that I’ve had sitting on my shelf for years. I bought it for the Jackson Pearce story (she was a favorite of mine back in high school), and I almost gave this book away unread. I’m so glad I kept it, though, because these are some of the cleverest fairy tale retellings I’ve ever read. I especially appreciated the queer representation in a few of the stories. Specifically, “The Twelfth Girl” by Malinda Lo is a lesbian 12 Dancing Princesses. “The Raven Princess” by Jon Skovron features a side character who is a friendly gay giant raising a human baby with his husband. And my favorite story, “Beauty and the Chad” by Sarah Rees Brennan, features a girl called Beauty who prefers to present as androgynous, and disguised herself as a boy to get a job as a servant in the castle of a beast- actually frat boy Chad from the modern US, under a curse. Chad pulls a Captain Shang and has a bisexual awakening when he falls in love with Beauty-as-a-boy. They get married and he finds out she’s a gender-nonconforming girl, and says he’d be happy and love her no matter what her gender was. It’s adorable and amazing and couched within a hilarious spoof of Beauty and the Beast, and I absolutely loved it. That’s the kind of fairy tale I want to hear more of. TW: this is a dark retelling anthology, so some of the other stories are seriously twisted. Warnings for abuse, sexual assault, rape, incest, murder and actual cannibalism. I’m not kidding. Hansel and Gretel is some intense shit. Tread lightly. (Especially with Saundra Mitchell’s story “Thinner Than Water,” where the incest-rape victim is the hero and defeats her rapist, but the story, while not explicit, definitely doesn’t shy away from the horror of what she goes through. Reading it absolutely made me sick to my stomach, so please use caution.)