Title: A Fairy Tale Murder
Author: Dulcinea Norton-Smith
Publisher: Self-Published
Publication Date: May 11, 2011
Genres: Fantasy, Historical, Retelling
Length: 14 pages
Source: I received a free copy from the author.
Rating: 3 Stars
Blurb:
Kids are always good and witches are always bad right? Wrong you idiot! Step inside A Fairy Tale Murder and discover the grisly truth.
Content Warning: Child neglect and abandonment. I will not go into any detail about this in my review.
Review:
So much depends on how you define the phrase happily ever after.
I strongly recommend going into this without reading any spoilers about it ahead of time. This is one of those cases when the plot twists work best, at least in my opinion, if the reader hasn’t been tipped off about them in advance and is hopefully surprised by everything they are about to read. What I can say is that I enjoyed looking at a famous fairy tale from a new perspective. Character development wasn’t something that most of those stories spent a lot of time thinking about, so there is a lot of room to explain why certain characters from them behaved the way they did and how their choices could be interpreted in many different ways if you finally have all of the information instead of only some of it. Kudos to the author for using this approach to breathe fresh life into something so well known.
As much as I liked the premise, I struggled with the plot holes. There were multiple instances of characters either not communicating with each other or not thinking through the rational consequences of their actions. It was understandable when the kids did it as they were traumatized and their brains were still developing, but seeing adults do the same thing so often was hard to figure out. If only a few more scenes had been included to help explain why the characters consistently made decisions that that they should have thought twice about. I so desperately wanted to give this one a higher rating!
Dympna was such an interesting protagonist. It made me smile to read about the details of her life that might have been exaggerated just a little in order to make this feel more magical. Then again, maybe everything happened exactly as she recounted and she was simply someone who broke all sorts of rules about what life in the Middle Ages was like! There is definitely something to be said for leaving such things up to the reader’s imagination and not giving us strict input about how we should interpret them.
A Fairy Tale Murder was a creative look at an old classic. Now I must end this review before I accidentally give any clues as to which one I’m talking about!