Twice Upon a Time

As with all short story collections, I really liked some, really hated some, and the rest were somewhere in between. My average rating for the book as a whole was 3 stars, but I decided to go with an “It's okay” rating of 2 stars because of the repetitive stories. There was not enough variety in the retellings, with 2 of the 18 being about finding Rumpelstiltskin's name, and 3 being about how Jack (of the Beanstalk variety) is a murderous piece of crap. Of those three stories, two were set in a court room. Beyond that, the seven dwarves and Hansel and Grethel show up A LOT. There should have been more thought given to the overall composition of the collection to avoid this. It became tiresome reading about the same set of characters in different ways. There are more than enough fairy tales out there to avoid any sort of overlap at all.

The stories I most enjoyed were How I Came to Marry a Herpetologist, Gilly the Goose Girl, and Baron Boscov's Bastard. I absolutely hated Wolf at the Door and The Emperor's New (and Improved) Clothes.