The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales ed. by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe (review)

New Fairy Tales, reads the subtitle of The Starlit Wood, and that subtitle at first read may seem misleading. Although each story in this anthology puts a fresh face on a traditional tale, the core interest of the book is the dialogue between old and new rather than the production of purely new stories in the fairy-tale vein. This book follows in a long tradition of retelling anthologies, especially popular since the 1990s with books such as Snow White, Blood Red (1993), and its companion volumes, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. In the process of retelling, old stories are made new, and their perspectives and priorities are refreshed to reflect current culture, as happens with folktales over time.

The Starlit Wood takes a distinctly twenty-first-century approach with its parameters, including not only the usual European stories like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Sleeping Beauty" as inspiration, but also non-Western tales such as "Dā Tràng and the Pearl" from Vietnam and "The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle" from the Arabic tradition, recently released in its traditional form as a part of the Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange collection (2014), translated by Malcolm Lyons. The balance of inspirational tales in The Starlit Wood makes the book valuable both for those interested in the Western fairy-tale tradition and for those with broader interests.

Each tale in the anthology takes a specific traditional story as its inspiration and revises, retells, or remakes the tale in the context of current modern sensibilities. Many of this book's tales, mainly those with origin stories from the European tradition, rely on the reader's familiar knowledge with the inspiration to work their magic. Some, like Seanan McGuire's opening tale "In the Desert Like a Bone," even act as sequels, rather than strictly retelling, following up on aspects of the traditional tale that may puzzle or frustrate a modern reader. McGuire picks up on the sexual subtext of "Little Red Riding Hood" and creates a story in which the young protagonist becomes more like the wolf herself, an interesting and somewhat violently empowering counterpoint to the victimization narrative of traditional versions of the tale preserved by Charles Perrault or the Grimms.

Many of the stories here focus on restoring the agency and empowerment of women in particular, reclaiming stories—again, especially those coming from the Western world—from the patriarchal trope of "boy saves girl" and transforming such tales into examples of women saving themselves and/or each other. Amal El-Mohtar's award-winning "seasons of Glass and Iron" accomplishes the latter elegantly and intentionally, combining two traditional tales—"The Glass Mountain" and "The Black Bull of Norroway"—and using their complementary magical elements to solve the challenge of each protagonist. The vivid and brilliant story "The Briar and the Rose" by Marjorie Liu achieves a similar effect, but changes all the primary players in the story—including the figure of the prince—into women. Liu's main character, the Duelist, embodies both feminine and masculine qualities, fulfilling the role of the prince—at least in the sense of rescuing the sleeping beauty—with more nuance than the average fairy tale usually grants its hero.

Therein lies one of the great achievements of this particular collection of tales: every story offers up a nuanced consideration of the parent tale. Although gender empowerment is a dominant theme, and one of the most evidently thought-through, it is not the only one. Even stories such as Daryl Gregory's "Even the Crumbs Were Delicious"—which takes a casually postmodern approach to "Hansel and Gretel," setting the retelling in the author's own universe, complete with home-printed drugs and a light-hearted tone despite its serious themes—clearly and cogently consider the social implications of fairy-tale plots and themes. What really happens to kids whose parents do not want them...