Really Short Review: The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales Anthology

The Starlit Wood
Edited by Dominik Parisien
and Navah Wolfe
Release: October 18, 2016
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An all-new anthology of cross-genre fairy tale retellings, featuring an all-star lineup of award-winning and critically acclaimed writers.

Once upon a time. It’s how so many of our most beloved stories start.

Fairy tales have dominated our cultural imagination for centuries. From the Brothers Grimm to the Countess d’Aulnoy, from Charles Perrault to Hans Christian Anderson, storytellers have crafted all sorts of tales that have always found a place in our hearts.

Now a new generation of storytellers have taken up the mantle that the masters created and shaped their stories into something startling and electrifying.

Packed with award-winning authors, this anthology explores an array of fairy tales in startling and innovative ways, in genres and settings both traditional and unusual, including science fiction, western, and post-apocalyptic as well as traditional fantasy and contemporary horror.

From the woods to the stars, The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales takes readers on a journey at once unexpected and familiar, as a diverse group of writers explore some of our most beloved tales in new ways across genres and styles.

Review:
Thanks to growing up with Disney movies like Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, I have been obsessed with fairy tales since I was little. I read all the fairy tale collections and retellings I could get my hands on. I loved everything from the dark originals to Disney's gentle reimaginings. When I first heard about this anthology and the authors that were apart of it, I was all in.

This collection features eighteen reimagined fairy tales by authors like Seanan McGuire, Max Gladstone, Garth Nix, and Naomi Novik. And it is awesome! These are our favorite old fairy tales made new for a modern age and a lot of them have a feminist angle. Things that have always bothered me about certain fairy tales were turned on their heads. I loved that the heroines have been empowered and some of them even save themselves in some of these stories. I also loved the variety of settings found in this collection. Several were taken "out of the woods" and were set in places from the Old West to Outer Space.

Overall, I loved this collection and can't recommend it enough! It's the fairy tale collection I never knew I needed until I read it. Also, the physical copy is absolutely gorgeous!

My favorites from this collection were:
"In the Desert Like a Bone" by Seanan McGuire
"Seasons of Glass and Iron" by Amal El-mohtar
"Giants in the Sky by Max Gladstone
"The Briar and the Rose" by Marjorie Liu 
"Penny for a Match, Mister" by Garth Nix
"Spinning Silver" by Naomi Novik

ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley

   

  4 /5 Stars