A review by yanghx92
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales by Kate Bernheimer

1.0

I was in actual physical pain trying to get through 500 over pages of what-the-actual-fuck-is-this. 7 chapters in and I could already see the direction this book was going in. Downfuckinghill.

I decided to tough it out and see if it gets better. Spoiler alert! It doesn’t.

The sad thing is this book had so much potential but it just never reached it. The authors talk about what their inspiration is and we just don’t see it appearing in their stories. If you had such a good idea going, why didn’t you use it????

This book was just an odd, sad compilation of school essays. Some of them made little to no sense. Some of them just didn’t want to subscribe to the theme given. Some of them talk about what they wanted their stories to present and proceed to submit a completely different essay.

It would have been great if a wider variety of fairy tales had been added. We see a lot of “white” fairy tales taking up 80% of the book and fairy tales/folktales from other countries (Japan, Mexico) taking up the last few pages toward the end of the book, like a ‘by the way’ afterthought.

Would not recommend.