I usually love fairytale retellings, especially when there is a dark twist to them, but this is not the groundbreaking book I was told it would be.

Out of all the retellings, only the Bloody Chamber and The Lady of the House of Love were somewhat enjoyable. Maybe at the time of publishing, they were indeed "revolutionary", but I honestly found them quite subpar. For starters, all the FMC (save for The Lady of the House of Love) share the same traits: young, beautiful, (white), innocent and more importantly "undamaged". Then it usually goes into a gruesome description of how her innocence gets destroyed, and sure it's disturbing, but it's also uninspired. I've read so much better dark fairytales retellings that sublimed the original message, instead of just having it be "make it more overblown with sex, and make sure that it's always a predatory older man taking a young girl's virginity!". There's only so many times I can read the same story but with slightly (very slightly) different characters. We even get several retellings of the same fairytale (namely Beauty and the Beast and Little Red Riding Hood), and I can't figure out why cause neither version brought anything different to the table.

I'm very much aware that I am reading this with 2026 eyes, but for a feminist groundbreaking book, this sure felt very surface level. I have no doubt that it might've been considered scandalous a few decades ago (was it really), but don't expect the revolutionary feminist book it was supposed to be.