Monday, August 11, 2014

Fairly Wicked Tales - Edited by Stacey Turner - Classic Fairy tales from differing points of view

4.5 of 5 Stars     Review copy

The newest anthology from Angelic Knight Press is just shy of perfection, kind of like the evil witch in Snow White looking into the magic mirror and finding she was not the fairest of them all.  But it's OK, this collection is still plenty good.

What editor Stacey Turner asked her contributors to do was to take a classic Grimm's Fairy Tale and tell it from another point of view.  You know how they say the victors write the History Books?  Well, the same thing happened with all of our favorite Fairy Tales.  To get to the truth we might need to hear the other side of the story.

Take "The Tortoise and the Hare," in the tale we grew up with, the hare was lazy, believed he couldn't be beat and as a result of diligence the tortoise wins the race.  In Jay Wilburn's, 'Hare's Tale," we learn that all hares live under the tyranny of the tortoises and the hare in this particular story was injured and barely alive when the race was run.  Makes a big difference when you see it from the loser's point of view.

Inside Fairly Wicked Tales you'll find twenty-three delightfully twisted re-tellings of many of your childhood favorites, but don't get the wrong idea, these are NOT stories you would want to read to the little ones before bedtime or any other time, not that Grimm's Fairy Tales are squeaky clean to begin with, but many of theses have adult themes.

Each of the story-tellers comes at the theme in a different way and, for the most part, they all weave wonderful new stories.  Stories where Red Riding Hood is anything but sweet and innocent; there's a particularly fun twist to Sleeping Beauty; an even darker telling of Beauty and the Beast; Snow White is a vampire; the little mermaid has a taste for sailors; the boy who cried wolf is actually a were-boy and the Big Bad (B.B.) Wolf is totally misunderstood.  And that's just a sampling of the more familiar stories reworked in this entertaining anthology.

Fairly Wicked Tales is published by Angelic Knight Press and is available now for the Kindle from Amazon.com.

If you're a fan of Grimm's Fairy Tales, I really think you'll enjoy these Fairly Wicked Tales. 

Highly recommended.




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