Fantasy legend Jane Yolen (The Emerald Circus, The Devil's Arithmetic) delights with this effortlessly wide-ranging offering of fractured fairy tales. Yolen fractures the classics to reveal their crystalline secrets, holding them to the light and presenting them entirely transformed; where a spinner of straw into gold becomes a money-changer and the big bad wolf retires to a nursing home. Rediscover the fables you once knew, rewritten and refined for the world we now live in―or a much better version of it.
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[A FRACTURE IS A BREAK, usually in the bone, but it can also mean a crack in the earth, an interruption of the norm] ***(Tachyon Publications, 5 November 2018, ebook, 240 pages, ARC from the publisher and voluntarily reviewed)
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Stories included
- Snow in Summer
- The Bridge's Complaint
- The Moon Ribbon
- Godmother Death
- Happy Dens or A Day in the Wold Wolves' Home
- Granny Rumple
- One Ox, Two Ox, Three Ox and the Dragon King
- Brother Hart
- Sun / Flight
- Slipping Sideways Through Eternity
- The Foxwife
- The Faery Hag
- One Old Man, with Seals
- Sleeping Ugly
- The Undine
- Great-Grandfather Dragon's Tale
- Green Plague
- The Unicorn and the Pool
- The Golden Balls
- Sister Death
- Sule Skerry
- Once a Good Man
- Allerleirauh
- The Gwynhfar
- Cinder Elephant
- Mama Gone
- The Woman Who Loved a Bear
- Wrestling With Angels
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I enjoyed every story in this collection. I love it when authors take a well-known story and shape and twist it into something completely new. Fairy tales present almost endless 'what if' possibilities. Yolen distorts some well-known fairy tales in this collection but there are also tales I'd never heard of before. Every page was a treat to read. Some of the stories are even darker than the fairytales. I loved what Yolen does with this collection. I particularly enjoyed The Bridge's Complaint, Sun / Flight, Brother Hart, One Old Man, with Seal and Sister Death.