Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul

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What we need to teach them is how to stand up for themselves and speak out against those that are treating women (or others) inappropriately. Gill reimagines the renowned tales through magical short stories and poems to empower and motivate all who read.

The author takes on these questions and gives us a much more darker and fierce version of the classics like Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood etc. Reimagining traditional tales, this empowering collection of stories, poems and beautiful hand-drawn illustrations gives Once Upon a Time a much-needed modern makeover. Those that especially caught my eye included the image preceding A Tale Of Two Sisters, and the image relating to The Looking Glass. A bit too much feminism (for my humble taste) but a lot of it was actually nice and mostly well-balanced.Anxious people are resourceful, they need to know how to keep the sea of panic at bay so they do not drown. This powerful, empowering, fierce book, reimagines our favourite fairytales; often from the feminist perspective of the ‘villain. I especially loved the way she talked about learning to love and believe in ourselves, to standup for our convictions, how we are complete by ourselves and don’t need a man to save us, and how we should be in solidarity with other women instead of viewing them as competition. My favourite poems from the collection were Trapped, Scheherazade The Clever, Wonderland Villain, The Dragon Witch’s Daughter, Baba Yaga and In Absentia: A Common Curse. For me, the collection was great, but I think I am the type of reader that needs to spread this out a lot more over time.

It was an absolute joy to read them and I'm excited to see that the author Nikita Gill has other collections of poetry. To conclude, if you love reading poetry or books written in verse, you should definitely check this out. I think maybe if I spread them out more and read one at a time it would have been a different experience than just reading the entire collection. I know it might sound a bit deranged, but I would make sure that I would read some of the poems and stories in this book to my children to make them understand that stories, even though beautiful and magical, can be told in so many different ways.Un kāpēc gan šajā laikā nepalutināt sevi ar kādu īsu stāstiņu vai dzejolīti, kad tik grūti smadzenēm likt pievērsties kādam tekstam.

Complete with beautifully hand-drawn illustrations by Gill herself, Fierce Fairytales is an empowering collection of poems and stories for a new generation. Most of these poems read like they were ripped from a Tumblr post or Twitter thread on empowerment and self-love. Eine Welt, in welcher Prinzessinnen bestens in der Lage sind, sich selbst zu retten und in welcher die Grenzen von Schurken und Helden verschwimmen.This is filled with poetic retellings and short stories of fairy tales, as well as a few original tales. There are princesses rescuing themselves, villains who are comfortable being villains, new perspectives on certain stories, and many other unique twists. What I loved about the book is how each character had a story that show them flawed and human, breaking the unrealistic standards.

The idea of updating fairy tales or poems and putting them in a gorgeously bound (and illustrated) book for children/teens is wonderful. I follow Gill on Instagram and while I’ve enjoyed her posts there, these longer stories didn’t have the same oomph that her shorter ones do. I kind of lost any hope for enjoyment when the phrase “how to play with your brokenness like it is a fidget spinner” was used. Gill needed an editor or publisher that spoke up about how any boy/man that picks up her book is likely to be put off by the end.

Along with the writing are illustrations done by the author that accompanies each piece which was gorgeous.