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<p>Review copy provided by the publisher. I also have the privilege to know the author a bit socially.</p>
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<p>We've now had several decades--all of my lifetime, in fact--with fairy tale variations, reconceptions, recreations as a major subgenre. So the question about a collection like this can sometimes be: is there anything new to say here? Is it possible to fracture a fairy tale in a way that is not in itself a predictable part of canon at this point?</p>
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<p>Happily the answer here is not just yes, but "yes and I will even show you a little of how it's done behind the scenes." I was pleasantly surprised to reach the end of the collection and find not only notes on each story but a poem to go with each--sometimes very directly, sometimes with glancing notes on the same theme. Many of these stories are from previous decades, and Yolen takes time in the notes to talk about how she thought of them then--particularly interesting when they span a cultural shift of awareness around who gets to retell tales from whom.</p>
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<p>I'd come upon some of these stories before in other collections of Jane's, but I'm never sorry to see "Granny Rumple" reprinted--it changed my world when I first read it, and I think it can do the same for writers and readers who encounter it for the first time now. Jane's warmth and humor permeate these tales, and breaking familiar stories like Snow White and Cinderella in more than one way in one collection gives us even more perspective on what these tales can still do.</p>
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While I liked the writing on the stories I read in this collection, it just didn't resonate with me. I made it about a third of the way through this collection, put it down and haven't really had any urge to go back to it. I've read longer works from Yolen and really enjoyed them, so I'm not sure why I didn't connect with this collection. I think part of it is that, for a work that claims to fracture fairy tales, many of these stories were extremely close to their source material. I was expecting much more originality to these retellings, when largely they followed the same paths as the original tales with only slight changes (gender reversals in some, the addition of a new character in others). Again, the writing is good, this just wasn't what I was expecting and I don't plan to finish the collection at this time.

(Star rating reflects my thoughts on the portion of the book I read only.)

A delightful collection of stories that span around the world retold then tweaked in a manner as to make them all new and with a lot more depth. definitely a good read

Thank you to Jane Yolen for pulling back the curtain and showing us how it is done. This is a must read for those who love reading, who are ready for fairy tales that might not be made into Disney movies, and for anyone who might be interested in writing one of their own!

Do you love fairy tales? Do you love remixed tales? This collection of Yolen's short form work is a masterpiece. These aren't simply alternative endings slapped onto well-known stories. These aren't simply told from a different perspective. Each and every story is a masterpiece. The stories she fractures come not only as twists to familiar traditional fairy tales of the western European cannon, but also Greek myth, Asian stories, and Jewish folktales. Yolen also includes how she came to write each story along with a short poem. This is a must-read for those who love retold tales.

As the title suggests, this is a book of various retellings of pre existing fairytales and folklore, with an introduction on how to create such works.

The first retelling was brilliant. Yolen gives us an alternate Snow White. I had a good chuckle at the ending and definitely prefer this version.
The Happy Den is an old folks home for wolves who tell their own versions of stories such as little red riding hood and three little pigs.
Sleeping Ugly was a nice short tale of the usual- maiden awakened by a princes kiss.
I also really enjoyed the story of St George from a family of dragons' POV.

HTFAF uses religion in most of the stories- as can be expected of fairy tales. There are Jewish themes threaded heavily through much of the content and the word God is only written as G-d in this book.

50% of the fairytales didn't work for me, some were too strange, some felt a little pointless and some were just plain boring.
I preferred the shorter of all these stories though I'm not quite sure why, perhaps it was harder to invest in any set up knowing the tales aren't very long.

The fun of this collection was trying to match up the stories to their original fairy tales, there are quite a few in this anthology that I didn't recognise but perhaps you will.
All are explained at the end of the book with an afterword and a poem. I would've preferred these to be printed alongside each tale rather than at the end.

How To Fracture A Fairytale is a useful instruction with varying examples for anyone considering writing their own retelling or simply interested in the art.

A collection of short stories, this volume of reimagined fairy tales is sharply written. Jane Yolen takes elements of familiar traditional tales and spins her own versions. The style isn’t quite my cup of tea, but the writing is skilful and lyrical.

I have a very mixed feelings about this collects of short stories. I like retelling, i like reading retelling 'cause i'll be able to see how in depth and twisted the writer would make it, in their own stories.
In this case, I certainly like a few of the stories. there are stories that is interesting enough but unfortunately there are also stories that didnt sufficiently grabbed my interest. I like the fractured fairy tales but i was looking for a more drastic changes from the original story or source material. If you're going to do a retelling you must take that risk of turning the story into a complete 180 degrees. i mean, whats the point of retelling of youre not turning the whole story upside down.

This book was a fresh take on classic fairy tales (three punk pigs), but also included original stories.
The stories were thought provoking and interesting.

The end of the book was really interesting when the Author described the thought behind her "fractures"

Amazing. Written by an obviously well-schooled author. Yolen takes these old stories and breathes much needed new life in them. And avoids the cliche "re-telling" trumps like the plague.

Each story has it's own unique flavour and bleeds personality.

Loved it. You will too.

This is an amazing book for lovers of Young Adult fantasy, specifically for fairy tale writers and Fantasy authors. It was a real treat to read this and to share it with my friends in my writing community.

I regret that I was unable to schedule this book into my blog's schedule, but will still whole heatedly recommend it to others. Thank you for sharing it with me!

Jane Yolen's "How to Fracture a Fairy Tale" is an enjoyable read. I love how she has retold and reimagined some of the most well known fairy tales and given them a fresh life. It is interesting to consider a fairy tale from another characters prospective, and see through another lens. I read these to my daughter as well, and she likes many of them as told by Jane versus the original version that she knew. I look forward to reading more by Jane Yolen.

How to Fracture A Fairy Tale collects stories and poems from across Jane Yolen's long career and adds in a significant amount of new material. It covers not only fairy tales, but also myths and legends--such as Icarus, or Arthur and Guinevere.

The bulk of the book is given over to the stories, while the final 15% or so contains explanations of how Yolen put her own spin on each story and pairs it with a poem. I personally would have preferred each explanation and poem to immediately follow the story, in part because I have a terrible memory. However, it does allow readers to move easily from one story to the next. One could easily skip the poems and explanations if one wanted to... though I wouldn't recommend it. I often found the poems to be punchier than the stories and many contained lovely imagery.

As with any collection or anthology, the material was a bit hit and miss for me. I felt many of the stories were more focused on ideas than emotions, making the fractured fairy tale an intellectual exercise. This is another reason I would have liked to see the explanations immediately follow the story.

Yolen has had a long and successful career. Many of the stories date back decades and I found myself noticing the ways they didn't meet the standards of today in terms of representation. Although there are a few self-rescuing princesses, a lot of the gender roles remain traditional, with the women taking care of domestic chores, while the men are the hunters, bread-winners or rulers. I only noted two stories where a prominent character had been gender-flipped and both involved turning an avatar of death into a woman. By and large, people of colour appear only in stories where the entire story is set in a non-white culture. There were a handful of such stories. One Ox, Two Ox, Three Ox and the Dragon King rather rubbed me the wrong way, substituting a dragon with a Western temperament for the calmer Eastern one. But by and large, the remainder of these stories seemed okay--with the caveat that I'm not of the cultures represented and am therefore not the best judge. Unsurprisingly, the Jewish stories fared best and seemed to have the most heart, tapping into Yolen's own background.

Being fairy tales, there was a lot of dark material. Stories come with trigger warnings for sexual assault, incest, concentration camps, and physical and emotional abuse. There was also some body shaming and sex shaming. Readers are advised to tread with caution.

Some favourites of mine included One Old Man, With Seals, which takes the Greek shapeshifting sea god Proteus and introduces him to a modern, retired librarian; Great-Grandfather Dragon's Tale in which an elderly dragon tells his grandchildren the tale of Saint George and the split between dragons and men; and Mama Gone, yet another story about a dead mother... but one who returns as a vampire. Of the poems, I liked Warning from the Undine, a nicely sinister poem with a more traditional rhyming scheme than most of the other poems in the collection; To Be Paid, a satisfying and rather political poem about writers taking vengeance through their art; and When I was a Selchie, a poignant meditation written after the death of her husband.

All in all, How to Fracture a Fairy Tale shows the span of an impressive career, but it's a collection that needs more inclusivity for a modern audience.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my unbiased opinion.

How to Fracture a Fairy Tale is a collection of short stories by Jane Yolen. All of these stories have been published before in various places. However, at the end of the book, there is a little background on how she decided to write each story and an accompanying poem for each story.

I was unfamiliar with some of the fairy tales she used to base her own stories on; others, I could easily recognize. As tends to be the case with short story collections, I liked some of the stories better than others. The stories varied in length and tone; some had happy endings, while others were very bleak. My favorite story in the collection was "One Ox, Two Ox, Three Ox, and the Dragon King".

** I received an Arc in exchange for an honest review.**
I love different takes on fairytales. This book is a full of short retellings. The introduction by Marissa Meyer was awesome and the authors discussion about how to deconstruct a fairytale was fantastic.
If you like retellings, this book might be an awesome way to palate cleanse between books. You could definitely read a few stories at a time. It would also be a great resource if you are looking to break a fairy tale down on your own.

This had a nice variety of stories, and the author's notes about how she fractured and why she decided to include each one are very enjoyable. Even though each story is a fairy tale, the tones are very different. We see the Three Billy Goats Gruff from the Bridge's point of view, a non-attractive Cinder-Elephant, and trips to a concentration camp. I liked the creativity of the approaches, and enjoyed reading the book.

Received via Netgalley for review.

2.5 stars rounded up to 3.

I think maybe Jane Yolen isn't for me. Or, at least, this collection of her stories isn't for me. I appreciate that it's a mix of original stories and others previously collected, but the tone and quality varied so wildly that I kept getting the equivalent of whiplash.

I don't think this is suitable for younger readers (less than maybe 12/11, depending on the maturity of course) - there's a lot of discussion of sex, incest, and rape. I understand that these are aspects that were present (usually) in the original tales, and that they were much darker than we are used to, which is why some might be drawn to it., but is why I wouldn't add it to a middle school collection. The way that she glosses over some potentially troubling aspects made me a little uncomfortable, though (things like how the Foxwife didn't want to get married, and I wasn't sure if the sex in "Sule Skerry" was consensual or not).

The notes on how Yolen fractured her tales in the back half of the book were interesting to read, and provided some enlightenment, but I don't understand why the poems were included here as well. It would make more sense to have the poems accompanying the actual story they're meant to accompany; I think few people will read them in their current placement.

The ones I didn't like were generally the ones that she originally envisioned as pictures books - "Happy Dens or A Day in the Wold Wolves' Home" (and yes, there are a little more than a few typos in my version, but I'm sure that will be corrected before publication), "The Bridge's Complaint," and "Sleeping Ugly," generally because they still felt juvenile and out of place in a collection where other stories discuss topics such as the commodification of women etcetera.

I really enjoyed "The Golden Balls," "Allerleirauh," and "Cinder Elephant" (and the poem meant to accompany "Wrestling with Angels"). Cinder Elephant is a fairly innocent tale with a beautiful last couple of lines (about the step-sisters's not being able to understand her forgiveness), while the other two were darker and more poignant. I had absolutely no idea that "Allerleirauh" was a Cinderella variant - I thought it was Snow White!

For so many stories, liking 3, disliking 3, and feeling ambivalent about the rest isn't a successful record.

2.5 Stars

ARC provided by NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review

One thing I discovered upon reading this book is that I don't like books made up of short stories.

It's really hard to come up with a review for this book because there are so many stories. Each of them is different, and there are some that I really enjoyed, and some that really rubbed me the wrong way.

I liked that there was a variety of writing styles within the book since if the entire book was written in a fairytale type way I would not have enjoyed it at all. Some of the stories came across as very childish, “Happy Dens or A Day in the Old Wolves’ Home”, in particular, is one that comes to mind.

Also, some of the story's gave off a misogynistic/racist/anti-semitic vibe? I think that Jane Yolen was trying to write it like a Grimm's fairy tale, but I don't think that the product of their time converts well into a product of our time.

One story in particular like this was "The Foxwife”. In this story, a guy forces a woman (or in this case a fox spirit) to marry him. It mentions that she didn't want to, but it ends up glossing over it and leaving it with a "happy ending".

"Sleeping Ugly" was another story that I didn't really understand. The moral of the story is that just because someone is pretty on the outside doesn't mean they're pretty on the inside as well. But I don't know how someone magically making someone else fall in love with them and then using the body of the "ugly" princess as a house decoration is supposed to show how kind they are.

There were also a few stories that didn't make much sense? I don't know if they were supposed to be a parable or something, but the point and plot were definitely lost on me. "The Unicorn and the Pool" is one of these. In this story there is a pool of poisoned water, the unicorn touches its horn to the water and removes the poison from the water so that the other animals can drink, but a few days later the unicorn dies. This story was only two pages, and I'm not quite sure what it was supposed to mean.

I'm also not sure what age group this book is intended for. Some stories are written very simply, as if they are children's stories, while others contain mature content that is definitely for adults. ("Golden Balls", "The Undine")

I really wanted to like this, because I love fairy tale retellings but it just wasn't my cup of tea.

I adored this - a great re-telling of some pure classics. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, it didn't feel like a task at all and definitely something I would recommend to my family and friends if they like fairy tales.

This book was a difficult one to get into. I definitely had to be in a specific mindset to even give it the chance of getting read. Yolen easily was able to draw you into the story but sometimes left you unattended in her world. Needless to say, there were a lot of times I was easily distracted.