A review by tasharobinson
How to Fracture a Fairy Tale by Jane Yolen, Jane Yolen

4.0

Picked this one up expecting some pretty brief, light, occasionally snarky retellings of fairy tales, and that's initially what I got. The take on Snow White where she recognizes her evil stepmother disguised as a witch, and brains her with a frying pan because she's no fool, is enjoyable, but not exactly challenging. Or the version of "Billy Goats Gruff" from the bridge's point of view is a strange idea with a cute execution. But the deeper I got into this book, the more it felt like a radical act of re-creation and re-defining what stories do. Part of it's just the cumulative power of an increasingly creative number of rethinks on classic stories, and part of it's the insight into national identities and how they use folklore (particularly Jewish identity), and part of it's just the simplicity of these stories, The final pages are devoted to small poems that further recast these fairy tales, and they're even simpler, and I love how spare they are in execution, and how much they get at the heart of fairy-tale logic and morality.