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A review by smart_girls_love_trashy_books
Black Thorn, White Rose by Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling
3.0
~POTENTIAL SPOILERS~
Yes, I wanted to keep going with short story collections to ease myself back into the groove of reading more regularly again and since I liked the idea behind the first volume and thought it'd get better I decided to give this second volume a try. And did it get better with a new group of authors? Eh? This edition certainly had a greater amount of really good stories compared to the first, but also a lot of the same issues. Some stories were just weird for the sake of being weird, whereas most of them had the same dry tone to them that plagued most of the stories in the first volume.
Like why does an ogre work in community theatre in an otherwise mundane setting? Why was the Frog Prince a random alien? What was up with that gross Cinderella retelling? And again, most were just dull and hard to get through when they really didn't need to be. There's no point in reviewing them all individually because I just summed up the biggest problem with most of them, they were dull, dry, and written in uninteresting styles. Thus, I'll just talk about the ones I had the most thoughts on.
Unlike the first volume, I do think there were more works here that I liked more. Journeybread Recipe and Silver and Gold were as usual very great retellings of Little Red Riding Hood, a story I'm convinced you can't go wrong with. Somnus' Fair Maid was my favorite type of retelling, one set in an entirely historical period, this one being the Regency. Can't Catch Me is a short but great take on the story of The Gingerbread Man from his perspective.
Sweet Bruised Skin was a retelling of The Princess and the Pea which I wanted to like, I enjoyed seeing it from the queen's perspective and explain why she was the way she was, but despite it being one of the longer stories in this collection, I was still left wanting more. Same with The Goose Girl, it had a good twist but I felt like it needed more 'oomph'. The Black Swan, while officially not retelling anything, had enough similarities to Swan Lake for me to make note of it, and it was pretty good as well.
To me, one of the best was The Sawing Boys. 1920's Southern flare, what's not to love? Tattercoats was very sweet. Granny Rumple was also great, going back to what I said earlier about retellings set entirely in our history. Here 'Rumpelstiltskin' is just a Jewish moneylender living in Ukraine who gets defaced by a dumb yet greedy girl. Godson, despite its length, was easily one of the best here. Though the retelling is pretty obvious early on if you know your fairy-tales, that doesn't dampen the experience at all. The modern setting works well to play with the themes of the Brothers Grimms' Godfather Death.
Overall, this collection was much better than the first edition with more stories I liked, hence the higher rating, but it still suffered from the same overarching issue the first one had where most of the stories were overly dry and dull with disengaging styles. This review is not as long as some others purely because I don't need to keep repeating myself. Just because you're writing for adults doesn't mean you have to adopt a clinical, bored tone. Adults deserve better. Maybe the third volume will be the one that starts to understand that.
Yes, I wanted to keep going with short story collections to ease myself back into the groove of reading more regularly again and since I liked the idea behind the first volume and thought it'd get better I decided to give this second volume a try. And did it get better with a new group of authors? Eh? This edition certainly had a greater amount of really good stories compared to the first, but also a lot of the same issues. Some stories were just weird for the sake of being weird, whereas most of them had the same dry tone to them that plagued most of the stories in the first volume.
Like why does an ogre work in community theatre in an otherwise mundane setting? Why was the Frog Prince a random alien? What was up with that gross Cinderella retelling? And again, most were just dull and hard to get through when they really didn't need to be. There's no point in reviewing them all individually because I just summed up the biggest problem with most of them, they were dull, dry, and written in uninteresting styles. Thus, I'll just talk about the ones I had the most thoughts on.
Unlike the first volume, I do think there were more works here that I liked more. Journeybread Recipe and Silver and Gold were as usual very great retellings of Little Red Riding Hood, a story I'm convinced you can't go wrong with. Somnus' Fair Maid was my favorite type of retelling, one set in an entirely historical period, this one being the Regency. Can't Catch Me is a short but great take on the story of The Gingerbread Man from his perspective.
Sweet Bruised Skin was a retelling of The Princess and the Pea which I wanted to like, I enjoyed seeing it from the queen's perspective and explain why she was the way she was, but despite it being one of the longer stories in this collection, I was still left wanting more. Same with The Goose Girl, it had a good twist but I felt like it needed more 'oomph'. The Black Swan, while officially not retelling anything, had enough similarities to Swan Lake for me to make note of it, and it was pretty good as well.
To me, one of the best was The Sawing Boys. 1920's Southern flare, what's not to love? Tattercoats was very sweet. Granny Rumple was also great, going back to what I said earlier about retellings set entirely in our history. Here 'Rumpelstiltskin' is just a Jewish moneylender living in Ukraine who gets defaced by a dumb yet greedy girl. Godson, despite its length, was easily one of the best here. Though the retelling is pretty obvious early on if you know your fairy-tales, that doesn't dampen the experience at all. The modern setting works well to play with the themes of the Brothers Grimms' Godfather Death.
Overall, this collection was much better than the first edition with more stories I liked, hence the higher rating, but it still suffered from the same overarching issue the first one had where most of the stories were overly dry and dull with disengaging styles. This review is not as long as some others purely because I don't need to keep repeating myself. Just because you're writing for adults doesn't mean you have to adopt a clinical, bored tone. Adults deserve better. Maybe the third volume will be the one that starts to understand that.