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A review by midnight_voss
Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins by Emma Donoghue
2.0
I'm ambivalent about this book, to tell the truth. Like others, the objective behind writing the book the way the author has is something I definitely would be interested in. Flipping the script on fairy tales. Making them less heteronormative.
But in the end, the book doesn't do enough of either. I'm disappointed and unsatisfied, especially with a title such as Kissing the Witch, which is provocative, whereas the stories themselves are pretty bland when it comes to the romance and less than scandalous when it comes to upending the message of each story. Each character grows up and bleeds or swells and gets curves (apparently all women have the same experience with puberty). A lot of the threat of each story is taken out of the narrative and attributed to each female lead's own actions or poor choices (um, thanks for that), and I only ID'd three actual couples, but it was written so obliquely that it was hard to tell. It feels like the narrative is that mostly, women create their own social situations, and are responsible for the bad things that happen to them.
Unless your father is a crazy pedophile, in which case, it's okay to turn into a cannibal.
A redeeming factor is the interesting nested plot... but I spent a lot of time as I was reading trying to figure out why each character was connected to the other in the way that they were, and how they got from the"ending" of their own tale to where they meet the heroine in the story before. The book tries very hard to be clever, but it just falls short.
I think of all the Tales, the ones that stuck out for me the most were the Rose and the Skin (the latter, if only for sheer brutality).
But in the end, the book doesn't do enough of either. I'm disappointed and unsatisfied, especially with a title such as Kissing the Witch, which is provocative, whereas the stories themselves are pretty bland when it comes to the romance and less than scandalous when it comes to upending the message of each story. Each character grows up and bleeds or swells and gets curves (apparently all women have the same experience with puberty). A lot of the threat of each story is taken out of the narrative and attributed to each female lead's own actions or poor choices (um, thanks for that), and I only ID'd three actual couples, but it was written so obliquely that it was hard to tell. It feels like the narrative is that mostly, women create their own social situations, and are responsible for the bad things that happen to them.
Unless your father is a crazy pedophile, in which case, it's okay to turn into a cannibal.
A redeeming factor is the interesting nested plot... but I spent a lot of time as I was reading trying to figure out why each character was connected to the other in the way that they were, and how they got from the"ending" of their own tale to where they meet the heroine in the story before. The book tries very hard to be clever, but it just falls short.
I think of all the Tales, the ones that stuck out for me the most were the Rose and the Skin (the latter, if only for sheer brutality).