LGBTQ+ characters take center stage in Mardoll’s reimagining of classic fairy tales.
Mardoll’s fairy tales might sound familiar, but if readers pay close attention, they’ll notice he’s made a few changes from the classic Brothers Grimm versions. In one, a prince who makes a reluctant deal with a frog discovers the amphibian is a beautiful young man in disguise. In another, a princess falls in love with a woman trapped high in a tower, accessible only by climbing the woman’s long golden hair. In the wonderfully titled “Sometimes Hansel and Othertimes Gretel,” a woodcutter’s child identifies as a boy on some days and a girl on others. The kind woodcutter accepts the child’s fluidity, while the child’s mother is annoyed by it. As Mardoll explains in the book’s introduction, he has always loved the Grimms’ fairy tales—and has frequently given volumes of them as gifts—but found them lacking in one area specifically. “I was proud to share my love for these tales, even if sometimes I felt a gnawing hunger when I remembered how heteronormative the stories were; how much sooner would I have found my queer self if those old tales had contained queer representation?” In these 31 versions of the classic tales, Mardoll has removed instances of racism, antisemitism, and Christian moralizing while introducing queer and disabled characters. Women fall in love with women; husbands give birth to babies; and beautiful maidens use wheelchairs to get around. The tales are preceded by content notes warning of potential triggers, from the classic (“Cannibalism, Murder, Dismemberment, Execution”) to the contemporary (“Accidental Misgendering”). Mardoll also starts each story by identifying the pronouns of the characters who will appear in it.
Mardoll’s prose mimics the fabulist style of the original tales. The language is precise without delving too deeply into the specifics of character: “Once upon a time there lived a child who liked to be idle and daydream, as children often do. Their mother was very vexed by this and accused the child of being lazy, insisting that a young person on the cusp of adulthood as they were should learn a useful trade such as spinning yarn.” Gorgeous color illustrations by Dingley, which manage to feel medieval and modern at the same time, accompany the text. Some of the tales are essentially the originals with a few pronouns swapped: The Frog Prince seduces a man, and Rapunzel is wooed by a woman. The more interesting ones are those in which the characters’ queerness contributes to the plot, as in the fairly ingenious title story, which is perhaps the best in the book. The protagonist is a boy who everyone thinks is a girl. His cruel stepmother and stepsisters misgender him and call him Cinderella, and it’s only the power of a magic bird that allows him to present his true self to the handsome prince. While the reader may sometimes wish Mardoll had allowed the characters’ new traits to propel the stories in new and surprising directions, the author has succeeded in his task of creating more inclusive versions of the stories that the Grimms fans know and love.
A welcome, clever update of fairy tales that work best when they reinvent the originals.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2021
ISBN: 979-8985042412
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Acacia Moon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: FANTASY | GENERAL FANTASY | LGBTQ
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BOOK REVIEW
A fantasy adventure with a sometimes-biting wit.
Tress is an ordinary girl with no thirst to see the world. Charlie is the son of the local duke, but he likes stories more than fencing. When the duke realizes the two teenagers are falling in love, he takes Charlie away to find a suitable wife—and returns with a different young man as his heir. Charlie, meanwhile, has been captured by the mysterious Sorceress who rules the Midnight Sea, which leaves Tress with no choice but to go rescue him. To do that, she’ll have to get off the barren island she’s forbidden to leave, cross the dangerous Verdant Sea, the even more dangerous Crimson Sea, and the totally deadly Midnight Sea, and somehow defeat the unbeatable Sorceress. The seas on Tress’ world are dangerous because they’re not made of water—they’re made of colorful spores that pour down from the world’s 12 stationary moons. Verdant spores explode into fast-growing vines if they get wet, which means inhaling them can be deadly. Crimson and midnight spores are worse. Ships protected by spore-killing silver sail these seas, and it’s Tress’ quest to find a ship and somehow persuade its crew to carry her to a place no ships want to go, to rescue a person nobody cares about but her. Luckily, Tress is kindhearted, resourceful, and curious—which also makes her an appealing heroine. Along her journey, Tress encounters a talking rat, a crew of reluctant pirates, and plenty of danger. Her story is narrated by an unusual cabin boy with a sharp wit. (About one duke, he says, “He’d apparently been quite heroic during those wars; you could tell because a great number of his troops had died, while he lived.”) The overall effect is not unlike The Princess Bride, which Sanderson cites as an inspiration.
Engrossing worldbuilding, appealing characters, and a sense of humor make this a winning entry in the Sanderson canon.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781250899651
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Categories: FANTASY | EPIC FANTASY | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL FANTASY
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SEEN & HEARD
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | LITERARY FICTION | FANTASY
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