Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul

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Trust Nikita Gill when she turns classic fairytales in verses and her take about feminism, abuse, mental illness, love and empowerment. The poems are creative and beautifully written. I'm carried away with her words. Nikita Gill digs deeper into each character's personalities -- both villains and heroes. Our princesses aren't damsel in distress, they do not rely on their princes. It's refreshing to read my childhood stories in a different perspective. I enjoyed reading the villains the most because it's fascinating to read what caused them to be vile. Towards the end of the book I began to wonder if the author had run out of fairytales and was simply fuelled by anger. Poems like The Modern-day Fairytale and Ode to the Catcaller Down the Street felt like I was suddenly reading another book altogether, one that wasn’t enchanting and empowering, just mad. Perhaps if there were two sections in the book the shift would have been easier to process. Before I even talk about the content in this book, I just want to express just how much I love the cover. It is so attractive, and I'm afraid I've ran my hands over it countless times, which obviously, I'm unapologetic about, because it's simply beautiful. I'd buy it just for the cover. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, ask yourself why you let down your hair. Ask yourself would anyone who truly loves you ever allow it to be subject to such wear and tear. 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 also found there to be a lot of repetitive phrases. They read less like important mantras to tie together the collection and more like Gill couldn’t find different ways to say the same thing. Which is also a problem, because theres no need to say the same thing over and over. Russian: ...I was at the wedding, I drank mead and wine there; it ran down my moustache, but didn't go into my mouth!— hotcirclerpg (@hotcirclerpg) April 8, 2019 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. Included in the book are cosmological and mythological themes reminiscent of Nikita’s other books. In particular, the poem “For the Cynic” echoes “Miracle” from Wild Embers and holds space for the mystery of being alive. Here is the ending: 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.”Traditional fairytales are rife with cliches and gender stereotypes: beautiful, silent princesses; ugly, jealous, and bitter villainesses; girls who need rescuing; and men who take all the glory. But in this rousing new prose and poetry collection, Nikita Gill gives Once Upon a Time a much-needed modern makeover. Through her gorgeous reimagining of fairytale classics and spellbinding original tales, she dismantles the old-fashioned tropes that have been ingrained in our minds. In this book, gone are the docile women and male saviors. Instead, lines blur between heroes and villains. You will meet fearless princesses, a new kind of wolf lurking in the concrete jungle, and an independent Gretel who can bring down monsters on her own. There’s also a lot of hatred towards men sprinkled throughout, as well as the message that if you are a wife/mother/whatever then you are not living an important, full life or... something. I kind of just started skimming when there were horrible blanket statements about men and shameful undertones towards women who would want a “traditional” lifestyle. There’s empowering women to be independent and standing up to the patriarchy, and then there’s being an asshole. Just saying.

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.” 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.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. 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. Apologise to yourself for listening to abuse,/remind yourself that you are the fairest of them all.” He gives an example: “Earth and sky came together and had a child called Tāne, the forest, Tāne then had another child called Mumuwhango and Mumuwhango had another child and that child was said to have been raised upon the ocean … one day the child was on the ocean and met a group of dolphins. 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.

Reading slumps for readers often becomes an obstruction that takes a good, unputdownable book to bring them out of. Books written in verses with small chapters are the easiest and most reliable solution to the problem, Fierce Fairytales is one such book. With a whole new perspective for the readers to see the old classics, the overall journey of reading is pleasant and enjoyable. Nikita Gill blends poetry and fairytale stories designed to empower and reimagine the tales we are told as children. 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. In Hansel and Greta (note the name change), Jeanette Winterson gives us children in despair at the destruction of their forest to make way for a railway line.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian This beautifully illustrated book is as lovely as its cover is. Trust Nikita Gill to turn classic fairytales into verses, which are beautifully written and creatively expressed into words that you will get carried away with. She digs deeper into our everyday favourite fairytale character, both villains and heroes and presents us with a new side of theirs.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.”

Some stories and poems fuelled my hope, showing me victims becoming survivors and villains humanised. Others left a bitter aftertaste. Life’s like that though. While we want our happily ever after, it’s not guaranteed. When we think we have nothing left we find reserves of strength we didn’t even know we possessed. Some things life chooses for us but it’s our choices that define us. 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! My regular readers know I’m not a young woman. Therefore, I’m likely not the author’s target audience. On the other hand, I have granddaughters so the ideas matter to me. But Gill could have drawn me in with a more magical writing style. Although the tales aim for the fantastical, they mostly fell flat for me. There are heartbreaking villain origin poems; poems about how the universe came into being that are sobeautiful; poems of understanding, of empowerment, of encouragement. There are poems where Gill shows you a different perspective of a story, or encourages you to think about characters differently. There are poems where Gill is talking about a specific character, but feel like she's talking about, or to, you.

Read through these 50 Nikita Gill quotes and poems about love and self-empowerment and see why the London-based poet Nikita Gill is so amazing.

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 . . . Her mother told her she could grow up to be anything she wanted to be, so she grew up to become the strongest of the strong, the strangest of the strange, the wildest of the wild, the wolf leading the wolves." 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) 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? you should always believe in. Each time I read it I can feel myself sit up straighter and the resolve to rise up gets stronger. I don’t usually quote an entire poem but I had to here. I love it!