Gender Swapped Fairy Tales
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15
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Discover a collection of fairy tales unlike the ones you've read before . . . Once upon a time, in the middle of winter, a King sat at a window and sewed. As he sewed and gazed out onto the landscape, he pricked his finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell onto the snow outside. People have been telling fairy tales to their children for hundreds of years. And for almost as long, people have been rewriting those fairy tales - to help their children imagine a world where they are the heroes. Karrie and Jon were reading their child these stories when they hit upon a dilemma, something previous versions of these stories were missing, and so they decided to make one vital change.. They haven't rewritten the stories in this book. They haven't reimagined endings, or reinvented characters. What they have done is switch all the genders. It might not sound like that much of a change, but you'll be dazzled by the world this swap creates - and amazed by the new characters you're about to discover.
Reviews with the most likes.
You might think from the image on the cover, or from the dedication to their daughter, that this book swaps genders in a way to help women be protagonists instead of victims. I love old fairy tales, but I was excited to have a more lady-positive perspective.
There are 12 stories in this book. With the gender swapping, 7 feature male protagonists, 4 feature female, and one (Gretel and Hansel) is pretty egalitarian. There are fewer female mains than in the original stories from the 1890s! In addition, the authors specify that all they did was swap the genders, no additional editing. While it makes for an interesting study, it makes for disjointed reading; the language between the different stories is inconsistent, and especially difficult if you're reading aloud. A bit of editing would have helped make it a more pleasant reading experience.
The illustrations are gorgeous. I wish they'd been in a better book.
