Format: Hardback
Release Date: October 19th, 2021
Age: Children’s
Genre: Fantasy
Goodreads
Rating: 1/5 Stars
I was left feeling fairly unimpressed with this book. It felt low-effort, and I’m not totally sure what they were trying to say about gender in the way they’ve constructed this. The fairy tales are the Andrew Lang texts, put through an algorithm, with genders swapped. An interesting idea in theory, but it’s not enough to sustain this book. Some of the choices feel really off – there’s no real thought behind it, it’s all very surface level, and it still feels like these characters are matching up to rigid ideas of gender.
I couldn’t help but notice that where female characters had been swapped for male, the ‘new’ character had a different name (Handsome instead of Beauty), but male characters swapped for female had a feminine title put before their name (Mrs Rumpelstiltskin or similar). The new version of Rapunzel doesn’t let down her hair, she lets down a beard, and the rest of the stories follow a similar pattern. These start looking less like ‘algorithm’ choices and more human choices. I’m always interested in different versions of fairy tales, but I think if you want to say something about them, if you want to make a point, it takes more than swapping a few words around.
I haven’t read the original Lang fairy tales, but based on these they’re fairly dry compared to some of the more imaginative versions we’ve been exposed to. They’re also quite tame compared to other versions, more Disneyfied, and it feels like a better choice would have possibly been to rewrite them completely – keeping a fairy tale ‘style’ but actually putting more consideration behind the characters than changing pronouns.
Overall, this is an experiment that doesn’t quite work, or at least could have been used to springboard into something with more depth. But it has made me interested in reading more of the original fairy tales, as well as possibly checking out the Lang versions at some point, too.
Unwrapping Words 