Instead, the ‘support group’ is filled with infighting, arguing, and doubt about one another’s experiences. Most surprisingly, this book does not nitpick these recollections in order to point out how horrific they are, or how they only serve to hold up the patriarchal standards of society (we all know kids shouldn’t talk to strangers, but according to these fairy tales, neither should women!). And the biggest difference is that we are hearing about these experiences after they have occurred, so we know the storyteller has survived, but still baring the scars of these encounters. Reading these women’s stories through a feminist, modern-day lens is of course a much different experience than coming across the simplistic versions of long ago. Raina is the only woman without a public personae, but her story features a little man known only to the reader as Rumpelstiltskin.
Bernice dated the famous “Bluebeard”, a tech billionaire who sports a bright blue beard and collects woman like furniture, revealing his violent predilections at the very last moment. Ashlee is the winner of the latest season of a tv dating show, perfect on the outside, but struggling in a sham of a marriage she’s desperate to fix. Ruby wears a coat made of wolf fur, a trophy of the dangerous creature she was lured in by, then escaped from. Gretel fled from a house made of candy that she was held captive in, but her brother Hansel recalls a different experience entirely. Each woman already knows a bit about the other as most had all appeared in the news at one point. Their group is led by a man named Will, who initially seems helpful, insightful, and well-trained to lead a therapy group such as this. This would make the perfect book club pick too.įive women are meeting weekly to tell their story to each other in hopes of dealing with their trauma and mental health struggles.
It made me want to go back and revisit the fairy tales with my kids, eager to see their reactions. It’s a dark humour that permeates these pages, and I was entranced with the clever premise almost the entire way through, nostalgic as I slowly recognized the childhood stories these women emerged from. We all joke about how terrifying these Grimm’s Fairy Tales really are when you look back at them as an adult, and this book lays bare the true terror and trauma that the characters of those long-ago stories would have experienced. Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard’s Girlfriend, and Gretel are a few examples. The twist is that each woman is a famous character from a fairy tale. This book has one of the most unique storylines I’ve come across in years How to be Eaten by Maria Adelmann is all about a support group of women who come together in the basement of a YMCA to tell their stories.
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