Book Notes: Fierce Fairytales

Fierce Fairytales is a collection of poems by Nikita Gill in which she retells well-known stories from a contemporary feminist perspective. Sometimes she also takes the point of view of characters traditionally depicted as evil. In The Stempother’s Tale, for example, she tells us about the cruel woman that “She didn’t start evil. None of us is truly born evil. Evil is man-made.”

I like very much the idea of what Gill is doing here, providing more empowering and compassionate versions of well-known tropes. But I found the execution quite disappointing. The language fell flat and artless, and the stories themselves were undeveloped and shallow.

Amanda Lovelace does this much better.