Book 43: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me edited by Kate Bernheimer

I got this one for Christmas last year, I expect because it combined my love of fairy tales with Neil Gaiman.  Anyways, the reviews that I saw for it were mixed to negative, so I put off reading it for a while.  In the end, I can understand why some people didn’t like this collection, but for the most part I enjoyed it.  It was just as fucked up as the old fairy tales.

Kate Bernheimer gathered updated fairy tales, or brand new ones from authors all around the world because of a love of these stories.  There was a serious fascination with Bluebeard in this book, which is a story I don’t care for at all, but I can see why so many would want to write about it.  Only one story really made me ill, and that one was an updated version of The Wild Swans.  Naturally I enjoyed the stories contributed by Aimee Bender and Neil Gaiman the most; they were very creative and not at all disgusting, which helped a lot.

While not every story was great, most were entertaining enough for me to enjoy the book overall.  I think that they represented fairy tales pretty well in that most were disturbing and used to warn or moralize.  I’m not sure if I would read it again, but I would recommend it to people like me who still enjoy fairy tales.