A review by servemethesky
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales by Kate Bernheimer
3.0
Phew!! Finally done with this behemoth. Can’t remember the last time I’ve read a book over 500 pages. This is a hard one to rate since it’s short stories and an anthology—short story collections are hard enough since they can be uneven, but this is 40 different writers, too!
I mostly picked this up because awhile back, I’d been working on my own retelling of The Wild Swans and I heard there were a few retelling of it in here. Honestly I didn’t love any of them! And it was refreshing that my take on it was very different from theirs.
Some absolute favorites in here were: Dapplegrim by Brian Evenson, The Brother and the Bird by Alissa Nutting, and The Color Master by Aimee Bender. The first two were delightfully dark and fun, the third was very beautiful and moving.
Other stories in here I just did not get or hated the style, as you might expect with an anthology like this. Very interesting overall!
I mostly picked this up because awhile back, I’d been working on my own retelling of The Wild Swans and I heard there were a few retelling of it in here. Honestly I didn’t love any of them! And it was refreshing that my take on it was very different from theirs.
Some absolute favorites in here were: Dapplegrim by Brian Evenson, The Brother and the Bird by Alissa Nutting, and The Color Master by Aimee Bender. The first two were delightfully dark and fun, the third was very beautiful and moving.
Other stories in here I just did not get or hated the style, as you might expect with an anthology like this. Very interesting overall!