*Please note this review contains spoilers*

I have always loved folk tales. I don’t mean the Disney versions playing on the television which featured only happy endings and an extreme focus on marriage. I had a collection of unedited fairy tales as a child and read them a hundred times over. Bluebeard has always been my favorite (as an adult I try not to think too much about why…) but I also loved when an original version of the story completely broke with the Disney version all of my friends knew – it was like a secret I knew that they didn’t (look up the original Cinderella if you don’t know what I mean). As I grew up and become more interested in history, I turned to them again because, just like ghost stories and urban legends, they can tell you a great deal about a society’s culture and history.

HAG knows the importance of the folk tale and embraces it. This project gave a collection of female writers an original British folktale and had them reimagine and modernize them. They also created a podcast for the collection to keep the oral tradition of the stories alive.

Professor Caroline Larrington’s preface is vital to understanding the project and appreciating the stories. She explains why most of the stories within will not be the fairy or folk tales you expect because of the rise of printed text. Most British folk tales did not get recorded and dispersed in written form the way Hans Christian Anderson or the Brothers Grimm were, and oral histories and traditions were a bit more difficult to keep alive after the industrial revolution. But Professor Larrington also reminds us they will not be completely new to us as she assures us these disappearing stories “can be glimpsed now and again, here and there, like underwater reefs of glinting beauty and dangerous mystery, lurking just below the surface in the work of many fantasy writers…”

Each of the authors plays around with their tale in an individual way. Daisy Johnson opens the collection and throws you in headfirst when she sets herself as the one who gets pulled into the tale “The Green Children of Woolpit.” It’s a strong and perfectly unsettling start – a good reminder of how a good folk tale should throw everyone a bit off kilter. 

“Between Sea and Skye” tackles the selkie myth but plays with our expected gender roles – we have a male selkie and a human woman. However, our main character is also an archeologist who has found the graves of past women seduced by male selkies on the island giving her such an interesting perspective on her situation. Author Kirsty Logan also adds lyrical poetry to her story which calls back to the structure of the original tale. In the end it is not the selkie who seduced her who calls her to the sea and her untimely death but her beloved half-selkie son who doesn’t understand that the sea, which feels like home to him, will kill his mother.

“The Panther’s Tale” isn’t updated to the present day but is set at the height of the British empire when wealthy tradesman brought pieces and people and plants of the world back to Great Britain for their own entertainment. In this case it is a cursed princess who appears as a panther to all but a local woman and her daughter. The women and girl immediately bond and help each other with food and herbal medicine – areas of women’s life that cross centuries and cultures – only to be separated and our princess killed by the cruel men in their lives.

“The Droll of the Mermaid” is perhaps the most optimistic. Our hero, a young Cornish boy whose family run their village because of a wish made to a mermaid years ago, hates how cruel and violent it has made them. So, when he is given his own wish after helping another mermaid he simply wants to wipe the slate clean and live a better life – and he too gets his wish.

The final story “The Holloway” is one of the darkest and at first, I thought a bit simplistic. Whereas the other authors in the collection played out their tales in different situations or settings or perspectives, this one is a straightforward version of the original story set in the modern day. A young girl whose father abuses her mother wishes for help from the pixies of the moor, so they push him into a dark ditch one night and kill him. However, a few days of percolating about the tale and re-reading the original I realized by changing so few of the details, author Imogen Hermes Gowar instead reminds us that so many of the problems of the past – alcoholic, abusive relationships, bad parents, lack of help from society – are still here. At least Evie, the main character in the modern version, still has the pixies to turn to.

Maybe we all could use a little more magic – although we do always have to remember to be careful what we wish for.