Radwa's Reviews > The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror

1- The Daughter Cells: (4.5/5) A little mermaid retelling, it gave me chills. The way the little mermaid was "naive" was both chilling and realistic (in the story).

2- The Thankless Child (3/5): A weird Cinderella iteration but the ending was quite strange and... abrupt almost? Also the gender identifications and names and pronouns are really weird in this story.

3- Fear Not: An Incident Log (4.5/5): I kept thinking what fairytale or story this would be the iteration for but I gave up. Anyhow, I think this is my favorite tale so far, it's creepy and eerie, and I like when figures like "Death" are the narrators. (I don't think the narrator in this story is Death, but it's quite close to this concept).

4- The Six Boy-Coffins (4.5/5): A retelling of the six swans fairytale. I liked it a lot, and I liked the horrible twist added to it.

5- The Rabbit (5/5): It's an iteration of the Velveteen rabbit and it's my favorite so far. I think this kind of stories is what I expected going into this book. This kind of creepiness and magic.

6- The Merry Spinster (2.5/5): I didn't like this retelling of Beauty and the Beast, it was quite weird. Also, again with the weird pronouns. If "Sylvia" is a "daughter" why do they keep referring to her as a "he"? I just don't get it.

7- The Wedding Party (1/5): I don't even understand what I just read.

8- Some of us had been threatening our friend mr. Toad (1/5): The stories are getting worse, I skimmed through the second half of this story. I don't even know what that was.

9- Cast your Bread upon the Waters (1/5): that was disappointing...

10- The Frog's Princess (3.5/5): That was a creepy retelling, and I'm guessing it's nothing like the Disney film, but AGAIN with the weird pronouns. Why make them "daughters" if they're gonna be addressed as a "he"? why not jus make them sons?????

I give up on reading the last story, just because I feel done with this collection. I had higher hopes for this book, and though I liked a lot of the stories, the ones I didn't really really almost made me stop reading. I wish I had known that there was a section at the end for the inspirations behind each story, only found out about it after reading 9 of the 11 stories, but it's nice to see some of the things and references I missed.

The writing seemed choppy and the endings especially suffered the most. This book is called "tales of everyday horror", but at times I couldn't identify where the horror was. overall, it was a good collection, not horrible but not what I expected and wanted.