Review: 'Girls: Life Isn't a Fairy Tale' ('De Meisjes') by Annet Schaap, trans. by Laura Watkinson
Pub. Date: 04/03/2025
Publisher: Pushkin Press
A collection of dark, funny retellings of 7 classic and familiar fairy tales, giving young adult readers a new perspective for navigating everyday challenges.
These are no damsels in distress, but young women of flesh and blood - who certainly don't need rescuing. In these 7 famous fairy tales turned into enchanting, inspiring and sometimes hair-raising stories for today's world, you’ll find girls with their own dreams and desires, bravely facing problems that are both relatable and daunting and fighting to overcome them.
- A miller’s daughter with a special gift decides marrying a prince wasn’t such a good idea after all.
- A determined girl gives up on trying to kiss a frog.
- A fearless heroine comes face-to-face with a not-so Big Bad Wolf.
- A monstrous princess, held captive on a deserted island, yearns to break free and find her true place in the world.
- Two sisters, abandoned by their father, wander lost in the big city, until they meet a pair of very helpful old ladies.
- A young maid finds something terrible in a locked room while she is cleaning the Reverend’s house – then the Reverend arrives home.
- A forgotten young girl learns to finally let go of her sleeping big sister and live her own life.
From the author of the international bestseller Of Salt and Shore, and translated by the award-winning Laura Watkinson, these reimagined fairy tales are funny, feminist and achingly true to life.
Retelling fairy tales from a feminist angle has been a hot trend ever since Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber. I remember the illicit pleasure I felt at reading her stories, as well as the warm discomfort at having to talk about them in class. While remaining essentially true to the structure and themes of the fairy tales, Carter reshaped them into something that was wildly alive and sensuous, into something that spoke directly to the darker parts of being a woman in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Since then, almost everyone has tried their hand at adapting fairy tales into something new and much of the Romantasy hype is indebted to one of those (I see you, ACOTAR). Many of these adaptations are brilliant, but equally many fall into the Disney trap of creating idealised versions of these tales, re-emphasising, rather than questioning, the heteronormative, conservative values that warped many of these fairy tales in the 19th and 20th centuries. What makes a good fairy tale adaptation for me is recognising this questioning in the earlier versions and continue it, but with new forms. Carter focused, extensively, on the repression of female sexuality and alterity, for example, complicating the happy ever after ending of a marriage. Turning to Schaap's Girls, it is worth bearing in mind that it is aimed mostly at a YA audience. If one comes into this collection expecting Carter's overt bloodiness and sensuality, one might be disappointed. Schaap carries the same intention as Carter though, wanting to re-explore these familiar fairy tales for a new kind of audience, with attention to issues that arise for modern young women.
'Girls' features seven retold fairy tales. I enjoyed 'Mr Stiltskin', which is a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin and thematised the fact that many of the girls in the collection remain somewhat unnamed. In a way it remains the most faithful to the "original" of all the fairy tales, but it serves as a good introduction to the collection. 'Wolf' is a delightful take on 'Red Riding Hood', which raised questions about why we are sanitising and safe-proofing so much of life and whether we aren't robbing ourselves of something important by doing so. 'Biscuits' is a take on 'Hansel & Gretel', in which two sisters set out to find their father but end up trapped in a capitalist marketing scheme. It is definitely critical of parental figures, but also ends on a rather melancholic note. I did enjoy 'Frog', in which Schaap has her girl questioning what a prince really is. One could read a "give a nice guy a try"-mentality into it, but I think that is rather accidental. The final three stories are probably my favourites. 'Blue' retells 'Bluebeard' through the eyes of two sisters. Rather than focus on the horrors of the man's actions, Schaap reconfigures the tale to be about the relationship between the two sisters and how it is tested in a moment of crisis. 'Sleeper' focalises the 'Sleeping Beauty' story on the sister of the sleeper, her endless sacrifices, and her potential chance at living an actual life. Finally, 'Monster Girl' finishes off the collection and I was rather fond of this one. Born to be a princess, our girl is unfortunately a monster, and ends up on an island with a chaperone. Her life is one of endless constrictions and lessons, with the distant hope she will shrink herself into the ideal princess and that a prince will come. What comes instead is a foul-mouthed pirate and a form of freedom.
Annet Schaap finds the balance between simplicity and depth which, for me, makes up a good fairy tale. They are meant to be deceptively simple, only to haunt you with questions in the days to come. Her stories feature the kind of girls meant to make up her audience, I think, somewhere between childhood and early adulthood, both aware of the world around them and yet also still somewhat caught by the stories told about said world. I think Schaap also finds a good way of covering more difficult themes, such as death, love, sex, and abandonment, for a YA audience, retaining that slightly illicit pleasure I felt with Carter, but for a younger teen audience. I will say that many of the stories wrap up quite quickly and in a way which, to me, slightly belies the collection's subtitle, 'Life Isn't a Fairy Tale'. While I appreciate wanting to give young girls stories through which they can imagine a different kind of freedom or life, perhaps, in order to really remain "achingly true to real life", as the blurb states, we needed to actually allow for tragedy or cruelty to remain. The only story which really gets close to that, in my opinion, is 'Biscuits', which is why it is the one that has stuck with me most. Laura Watkinson provides an excellent translation as well, which matches well to the excerpts of the collection I've read in Dutch. Dutch literature, for me at least, always manages a certain intimate directness, which English cannot always match. Watkinson, however, manages it! The fairy tales are also accompanied by illustrations by Schaap herself. I will definitely be looking into getting one of Annet Schaap's works in Dutch soon!
I give this collection...
3 Universes!
Girls is an excellent collection of fairy tales for a YA audience. It provides a fresh take on the known versions of the tales, bringing all, one way or another, into the 21st century without sacrificing the fairy tale-feel.
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