Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul

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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.”

And after the prince is thrown out, the moon dragon and the princess continue to share the day and night and live happily ever after. (c) When you put your own twist on a well-known story, you should use that story in your marketing efforts to speak your reader’s language. Think of all the movies called A Cinderella Story or something like that. The titles themselves reference a story many people love and want to read a new version of. 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! She tells the world of how no damsel in distress ever needed a prince to save her and turns the helpless heroine into an empowered, free woman. The villains we all loved to hate are turned into a flawed human being who is simply misunderstood. The women in here are strong and unapologetic and they have wisdom to share and lessons to teach about identity, power, acceptance, and strength. The classic fairytales skilfully combined with the subjects of empowerment, love, feminism, abuse, and mental illness. It’s refreshing to read a new take on all the childhood stories we have been told. It is powerful, thoughtful yet so tender. The book is filled with magic, fire and truth, waiting to be told. The different angle she gave each tale is simply fascinating and worth a read. Traditional fairytales are rife with cliches and gender beautiful, silent princesses; ugly, jealous, and bitter villainesses; girls who need rescuing; and men who take all the glory.

I’ve been eyeing this poetry collection for over a year. I’m sad that I don’t like it. 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. 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." 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. 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.

Instead of a princess waiting to be rescued, Rapunzel in Gill’s version finds her own way out of the tower. Just as importantly, she also decides not to accept tainted love anymore as well. She isn’t just running from one bad relationship to another. She’s setting boundaries for herself. This is a very timely lesson for our current society. 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." Nikita Gill has taken classic fairytales, and in these she has masterfully combined the subjects of empowerment, love, feminism, abuse and mental illness. I enjoyed the way Gill kind of climbs into these characters in the stories, whether they are villains or heroes, and enables the reader to see them in a different perspective. 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.” In Solnit’s Cinderella Liberator, meanwhile, the eponymous heroine and the prince decide to be friends, and she opens her own cake shop, above which she houses hungry, frightened children “running away from the wars in other kingdoms”.I think the crux of the book is contained in these poetic lines from, Question the Fairytale. (ebook, location 1336) But perhaps most interesting in Gill’s blurring of the lines between classic heroes and villains is what she does with the men of fairytales. Prince Charmings, certainly, she and her leading ladies (aka: women warriors) have little use for. But the other men, the traditionally bad ones — Captain Hook, Gaston, the Mad Hatter — get a second chance at setting their stories straight. Captain Hook is just a young boy when he falls in love with Peter Pan — only to be left behind when Peter abandons him for the land where nobody ever grows up. Gaston is reconsidered as a character whose only chance a love, once lost, is wholly misunderstood. The Mad Hatter is in an abusive, lie-driven relationship that makes him second guess himself and his reality. “No one understands how little boys / who save villages, who become war heroes, / who have fathers that just expect / them to be brave no matter the cost / to the insides of their mind, become / villains without even trying to,” Gill writes. 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. Imagine fairytales where the line between heroes and villains are blurred, where there is violence in supposed Prince Charming’s, and where the girl is independent, brave and smart- and can fight her own battles against monsters. This book explored themes of abuse and self-love, how women as well as men can be toxic, and how it is your own business how you decide to heal- and that healing and becoming yourself again is a form of magic in its own right. Spellbinding and magical! I loved “Wild Embers” by Nikita Gill and this book of poems was just as good!

I know it might sound a bit deranged, but I would make sure that I would read some of the poems and stories in this book to my children to make them understand that stories, even though beautiful and magical, can be told in so many different ways. From the time when I first learned the meaning of feminism and feminist, to today, I have furnished and refined my knowledge and definition of the same. From what I know currently, feminism doesn’t mean girls to outshine boys in every aspect; it means equality in each aspect. No distinctions when a choice is being made. A man can be a happy house-husband, a woman can be a blissful housewife too. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a woman who chose to stay at home and support her family and husband, was forced to make the decision and not out of her own will. And if that means a willing suspension of disbelief just to create a new line-up of characters who in their own flawed way can help a few people realise identities, potentials and strengths—why not? 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. 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.”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) This collection of poems moved me beyond words. Gill brought tears to my eyes with how beautiful some of the poems are, she had me raging with a large number of them, and Gill had me feeling like she stood with me, beside me, an encouraging friend reminding me of my strength. This book is thought provoking and empowering, and so very important, and I implore you to read it. I'll definitely be buying Gill's most recent book of poetry, Great Goddesses! 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! NG:I consider my books my children. Your Soul Is a Riverwas my baby, Wild Emberswas my fire child. This book was the hardest one to write. I really wanted it to be the best book I’ve written, and show my readers that I can emulate different kinds of writing styles, which is why it’s a collection of poems andstories. It also includes original, hand-drawn illustrations by me. I’ve always drawn and painted—I completed my degree in communication design, and illustration was a part of that. The next book I’m writing will be a collection of short stories with no poetry at all. Apologise to yourself for listening to abuse,/remind yourself that you are the fairest of them all.”

The idea of updating fairy tales or poems and putting them in a gorgeously bound (and illustrated) book for children/teens is wonderful. The actual production of this book is amazing. I would have cherished it as a child just for how pretty it is; even if I didn't like all the stories. I think there is probably something here for everyone; but unfortunately you have to navigate a lot of obnoxious, in your face rhetoric to find it. Gill starts us out with the tamer stories and sets the tone and mood. She lures the reader into buying into her ideas, stories and verse. Only to take the last quarter of this book bashing, and I mean declaring all out war on, men. I didn't like this. It felt too overt and just too nasty to teach children or teens.

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work well in terms of subverting a familiar phrase (hello Western fairy tales that have overtaken our mythology), others get a little lost. Wendy from Peter Pan and Alice from Carroll’s Wonderland getting painted as victims of hallucinations and substance abuse, and stepmothers and evil sea witches turning into figures deserving our empathy are a mix that I’m still trying to make sense of. However the message is clear—Gill is out to create a kinder world for as long as we temporarily inhabit it. Gill gives us some wonderful quotes and moments in Fierce Fairytales throughout her (very) short stories and poem snippets. She has taken known fairy tales (some from around the world) and given them a darker or more realistic spin. Many Arabic stories, including a large number from the famous collection of Arabic folktales One Thousand and One Nights, begin “Once upon a time…”, though Sorbera cannot vouch for which language started the expression. The other common story-opener in Arabic is “There was and there was not…”, which is also echoed in Farsi, Maltese and Romani. In Great Goddesses , Nikita crafts a collection of poems and prose that reimagines ancient Greek mythology for modern readers and audiences. She focuses on retelling the lives of Greek goddesses from their point-of-view. A well-researched endeavor, there are many characters in this book, and Nikita explores a wide range of goddesses. As described in her publisher’s press release , Nikita “tells the stories of the mothers, warriors, creators, survivors, and destroyers that shook the world.” Stories range “from the potent venom of Medusa and the transformative sorcery of Circe, to the rising up of Athena over Olympus.”