The Naked Prince and Other Tales from Fairyland

I really enjoy fairy tale adaptations so I decided to give this a try, but I didn't like it very much. The whole book is very irreverent in ways that I didn't like. But if you don't really seek out fairy tale adaptations to read, you will probably enjoy this more than I did. I think I would've preferred it as a game or cartoon, instead of a book.

I was expecting something along the lines of the Fables comics. The creator of those is apparently a horrible person, but I enjoyed reading them a lot. They had some emotional depth and interesting plots, in addition to all the references (both fun and serious) to familiar tales. In contrast, this book is aiming primarily for comedy, but unfortunately, the humor is not my kind of thing. But I laughed at the fairyland lube and protection in every sex scene, as well as the author pointing out that every main character was 18 or over. It's also amusing that Mother Goose is the deity of this world.

I kind of hate myself for the pedantry of what I'm about to say, but one of the jokes especially annoyed me. The Grimm brothers were real people, folklorists and linguists, not fairy-tale characters. Writing something that fictionalizes a historical person's life is fine, if you're upfront about it or making an effort at accuracy. The way Jacob Grimm was mentioned here, though, was along the lines of the author revealing in the end that the main character was secretly Abraham Lincoln all along, while neither his past that the author has invented nor the content of the story convey any of the details of Lincoln's real life.

I liked the last story the best - it was playful in the way it dealt with fairy-tale tropes, but didn't have any outright jokes. It's about a young man's strange erotic journey from Milan to Minsk - I mean, through fairyland. It's a well-crafted story and it was easy for me to interpret it as a kind of coming-of-age allegory: meeting people who treat you badly, falling into cynicism, and needing rescue. But there was something big I didn't like about it. At one point, the main character is about to be raped and he manages to talk his rapist out of it by invoking the power of friendship or something. It made me uncomfortable. Kindness has never protected anyone from violence.