This powerful, empowering, fierce book, reimagines our favourite fairytales; often from the feminist perspective of the ‘villain. Also one story in here perpetuating the idea that women cannot be their own person while also being a wife and/or mother?

They replied solely on their superficial and surface level understanding and literary history of these characters, probably collated from Disney films or other mass-made reception material, and then wrote them into a painfully repetitive aggressive girl power, misandristic narrative because that’s what feminism is, right?To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

I would have cherished it as a child just for how pretty it is; even if I didn't like all the stories. The only way to true equality is to work together to level the playing field; not to get revenge and one-up anyone over anyone else. She also manages to tackle many important topics and themes in such few words that I thought it was masterful. The poems and stories are cleverly written, imagining "what if" the princesses in the stories knew they could rely on themselves instead of waiting to be rescued.

Maybe the old woman in Hansel and Gretel was misaligned and wasn't the one who tried to eat the children but instead rescued them when their father abandoned them. Even if this turns out to be my token poetry book for the year, I’m so glad to have made the choice.

My favourite poems from the collection were Trapped, Scheherazade The Clever, Wonderland Villain, The Dragon Witch’s Daughter, Baba Yaga and In Absentia: A Common Curse. Though the illustrations are gorgeous and there’s a couple of impactful poems/stories in there, I was ultimately unmoved and unimpressed with like, 95% of it.Encased in a stunning hardcover, Nikita Gill's book of enchanting fairy tales reignites the wonder behind the stories we all know and love.