I was burned out on them for a time, but I seem to be getting back into reworkings of fairytales – maybe it's just that life has been richer in princesses and wolves lately. Still, the retellings can't be too programmatic in their intent; the old, dark magic needs to be higher in the mix than the agenda, with room left for at least a little whim besides. And these short stories and poems deliver, upending the old notions, but not always along the same axes. The settings shift – what seems at first like the standard neverland of fairytale being revealed as an alternate history of Britain, or the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or maybe just down the road from you. Sometimes there's a reader within the tale, to be even more thoroughly wrongfooted than the reader proper, or one story feeds into the next. If the collection has a flaw – and doesn't every gem or enchantment in a fairytale? – it's that with most of the pieces so short, it can be too easy to gobble them in a rush. Thankfully, such gluttony doesn't meet the poetic justice it might in the old stories, but it still feels like it might not have been entirely fair on Goss' work. Almost all of which has the requisite spark of enchantment, though it will surprise nobody who knows me if I especially liked the ones in which pretty girls fall in love with bears.

(Netgalley ARC)

This was a very interesting collection of retellings. As an avid reader of Fairytales retellings, I liked how each was a twist I haven't read before.