I also found there to be a lot of repetitive phrases. They read less like important mantras to tie together the collection and more like Gill couldn’t find different ways to say the same thing. Which is also a problem, because theres no need to say the same thing over and over. This beautifully illustrated book is as lovely as its cover is. Trust Nikita Gill to turn classic fairytales into verses, which are beautifully written and creatively expressed into words that you will get carried away with. She digs deeper into our everyday favourite fairytale character, both villains and heroes and presents us with a new side of theirs. People are going to either love or hate the collection. They might be like, What have you done to my favorite fairytales? I’m hoping people will love it, but I do understand that people will want fairytales to remain as they are. However, when something is very mainstream, you need to ask questions and encourage your children to ask questions. In “Zeus, After” Nikita connects Zeus’ story with current feminist movements. This prose poem depicts how the patriarchy has abided and paved the way for men in positions of power, but it also shows the downfall of Zeus and correlates his loss of power to many industry titans who have been brought down by the # MeToo movement , giving a voice to women who refuse to stay silent after experiencing sexual harassment or any kind of violence towards them.

Given that there’s not much here for women “of a certain age,” I was happy to find the reworked story of Baba Yaga. Gill makes it into a tale about what it’s like to be an “invisible” older woman. And—hooray—Baba Yaga revels in it!Imagine if the holy river we bring to life every month was treated with the prayer and worship it deserved. Visualize fairytales that included the oceans in our stomachs. Aurora speaking to her mother about blood was a right of passage. Belle teaching a whole classroom how to care for their wombs. Queen Cinderella decreeing that the language of blood was no longer secret. Snow White, being able to declare to the dwarves, 'Excuse me, I have my period' without them being affected into silence and awkwardness. Think of a world where your period was not a thing or murmurs. How people knew that like the moon, half the world has a cycle, and because of this cycle, this process of our uterus letting go that humans exist, you see, blood does not take permission. Blood comes and goes as it desires, and it is a damned shame that instead of looking at themselves as the warriors they are, little learn to worry about how to afford this bleeding, instead of math, science, art, history, geography, literature, drama. Imagine a world where your period is normalized, where instead of fearing leaking every girl can declare proudly, 'I can do anything, and I can do it with holy blood rivers flowing.'" 49. "There is an entire forest full of the most incredible flowers, plants and trees inside you, and you are ignoring all of it to nurture a single tree that they planted inside your heart and abandoned. The people who left you this way don't deserve to become your favourite stories to tell. You are a massive forest full of beautiful and vibrant stories and every single one of them deserves you more than those that abandoned you to hell." 50. "I wonder what I could have done with all of the time I wasted wondering if I was good enough, pretty enough to exist." 51. "Some days I am more wolf than woman and I am still learning how to stop apologizing for my wild."

For some reason my review deleted itself so here it is again! Thank you to those who had liked and commented). Being a lover of fairy tale retellings, I've wanted to read Fierce Fairytales by Nikita Gill for so long now, so I decided to treat myself at the beginning of the year - and it's bloody incredible! Complete with beautifully hand-drawn illustrations by Gill herself, Fierce Fairytales is an empowering collection of poems and stories for a new generation. From Goodreads. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, ask yourself why you let down your hair. Ask yourself would anyone who truly loves you ever allow it to be subject to such wear and tear.She decided to use her poetry to modernize the toxic gender roles perpetuated by traditional fairytales. I think the crux of the book is contained in these poetic lines from, Question the Fairytale. (ebook, location 1336) In the stories and poems of Fierce Fairytales , Nikita subverts the stereotypes of submissive women. Little Red Riding Hood becomes an environmental leader of wolves instead of being eaten by one. Instead of letting a man use her body to come and rescue her, Rapunzel uses her braid to climb down her tower. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty wake themselves. These damsels in distress don’t need princes because they have the power to save themselves, and this is the prevalent message in Fierce Fairytales : finding your inner strength. He gives an example: “Earth and sky came together and had a child called Tāne, the forest, Tāne then had another child called Mumuwhango and Mumuwhango had another child and that child was said to have been raised upon the ocean … one day the child was on the ocean and met a group of dolphins. Nikita Gill puts an adult, mostly feminist spin on common fairytales and legends in her collection, titled Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul. For me, though, the content wasn’t as stirring as promised.

Desperation turns people sour, and she now saw life as an open wound. A shallow promise. A dark thing that should have loved her but instead tried to drown her. Her beauty fading, she recognized that she had failed to pass on her looks to her two daughters. And now she knew how important it is for a woman to be beautiful, as it is the only currency she truly had in this world, she became even more bitter. (c) I exist. Outside of being a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, I exist. I exist as a human first, as a being that experiences joy and suffering, beauty and learning, life and tragedy. I exist because the universe chose to put me here for a purpose higher than my relation to men. I exist because a wise old woman gave me a gift and now magic runs through my veins. So the problem is not my existence as half dragon, half girl. The problem is how you perceive it as so small, you do not believe I can exist at all apart from through my bonds with men.” Trust Nikita Gill when she turns classic fairytales in verses and her take about feminism, abuse, mental illness, love and empowerment. The poems are creative and beautifully written. I'm carried away with her words. Nikita Gill digs deeper into each character's personalities -- both villains and heroes. Our princesses aren't damsel in distress, they do not rely on their princes. It's refreshing to read my childhood stories in a different perspective. I enjoyed reading the villains the most because it's fascinating to read what caused them to be vile. My regular readers know I’m not a young woman. Therefore, I’m likely not the author’s target audience. On the other hand, I have granddaughters so the ideas matter to me. But Gill could have drawn me in with a more magical writing style. Although the tales aim for the fantastical, they mostly fell flat for me.Spellbinding and magical! I loved “Wild Embers” by Nikita Gill and this book of poems was just as good! I didn't know it was poetry until buying, or I had forgotten. I'm not a poetry connoisseur, but I do enjoy some contemporary poetry, and I was intrigued by how Gill would retell the various stories we know so well. With gorgeous illustrations by Gill throughout, Fierce Fairytales features 91 poems examining fairy tales and their characters, children's classics, and other ideas or topics through a fairy tale lens, and it's so, so powerful. Anxiety makes more heroes than history would care to repeat. It is better than sitting and waiting, letting the demon claw into your mind with worry. Anxious people are resourceful, they need to know how to keep the sea of panic at bay so they do not drown.” For Rapunzel it was realizing that no one who truly loved her would use any part of her body, not even her hair, as a ladder. No one who truly loved her would hide her from the whole world in a tower. When toxic love is finally recognized for the painful, deep wound that it is, all of us must do the drastic and the painful to cut away the poison thread that binds you together. Gill’s tales ask what if fairy tales were about saving oneself and becoming self-sufficient instead of waiting for someone else to save you. There are two key ways she twists these stories: point of view and morality shifts.

They are filled with inspirational messages (about Red Riding Hood: ‘Her mother told her/ she could grow up to be/ anything she wanted to be,/ so she grew up to become/ the strongest of the strong,/ the strangest of the strange,/ the wildest of the wild,/ the wolf leading the wolves.’). They are instantly shareable (‘We all have storms and stories/ inside our bodies/ that even the night sky cannot hold’). And some are predictably simplistic. Most of them deal with anxiety, self-esteem, body image and abuse, which give the impression that somewhere in Gill the poet lies Gill the budding therapist. It is not the re-imagining of fairytales so much as the themes in her work that are presumably the secret to her massive popularity. Reading slumps for readers often becomes an obstruction that takes a good, unputdownable book to bring them out of. Books written in verses with small chapters are the easiest and most reliable solution to the problem, Fierce Fairytales is one such book. With a whole new perspective for the readers to see the old classics, the overall journey of reading is pleasant and enjoyable. NG:Question everything—question the stories you’re told, question the things you’re reading. It’s almost treated like it’s a bad thing these days, but critical thinking is so important. If you don’t question, you end up with political situations like the one we’re in right now.What’s important in Māori storytelling is the constant reconnecting of people with the natural world,” Royal says. “Genealogies are genealogies of the world, of the birds and the bees and the fish and the trees as well as the humans, and all of that is woven together in this web of relationships. The storytelling is as much about those genealogies as it is about the adventures of those individual characters.” A bit too much feminism (for my humble taste) but a lot of it was actually nice and mostly well-balanced. I think the most interesting things about fairytales is how they bind women to this idea of moral perfection. And not just women but men too," she explains. "There are these really detrimental ideas that enforce gender roles, like passivity to the point of sleep (Sleeping Beauty and Snow White) and therefore unable to give consent yet are basically kissed when unconscious. I also find the concept of masculinity, where men have to be a certain level of stoic which involves repressing emotions." Great Goddesses offers tales for readers who love Greek mythology and readers who want to learn about these stories from a feminist perspective. With the hand-drawn illustrations to accompany the stories, you are sure to gain ancient wisdom from these well-crafted poems.