Beyond Grimm

Tales Newly Twisted

By: Phyllis Irene Radford - editor, Deborah J. Ross - editor

Narrated by: Christine Williams

Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

Not your grandmother's fairy tales....

From the far-ranging imaginations of Book View Caf authors comes this delirious collection of classic tales newly twisted into dark, dangerous, and occasionally hilarious re-tellings. From the golden isles of Greece to the frozen north, from fairytale castles to urban slums, join us on an unforgettable journey!

Stories by Vonda N. McIntyre, Laura Anne Gilman, Sherwood Smith, Judith Tarr, and more.

©2012 Book View Café (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Different and interesting, not what I expected

The performances were great no problem there at all. Perhaps a bit slow at times, each story is different.
I thought perhaps this was a gathering of the same Brothers Grimm stories I am used to but without the editing for the kiddos.
I don't know if the description was clear on exactly what the collection includes. I'm a sucker for mythology and fairy tales so I went for it.
It's pretty good, some total twists on set in stone stories. Some stories I suspect are polish and irish and told differently. Then stories that just take a premise of myth perhaps and then say ,"what if it went like this instead."
A couple stories with some crazy sex in it, one in particular but I can't remember which at the moment.
It's worth a listen for the great ones and skip what you don't like. I enjoyed most of it.

Good when you have nothing else left to read

I go through so many books here on Audible that I sometimes run out of things to listen to before I purchase more. I had saved this book because I thought it would be really interesting and expected a lot more than what I got. The majority of the short stories were okay but nothing to write home about. some could not even be called something from Grimm's Fairy Tales at all. I think I skipped through a lot of them fast Forwarding hoping they would get better as I went along but they did not. There were none that stuck out to me I think I only truly enjoyed 1 or 2 I can't even remember to be honest. I would not recommend buying this book.

Not really fairytales

So... based on some of the other reviews, I wasn't expecting this to be groundbreaking or enthralling, but I still thought that it would be worth a listen since it was free and wasn't committing me to another series.

But man, 11+ hours now wasted, I really should have taken the negative reviews more to heart.
This book was pretty bad.
But I kept thinking that there was going to be at least 1 or 2 excellent stories to make it worth it, so I kept listening... through the entire thing... and never found that anchor story.

I'm usually pretty easily satisfied with books, even the underwhelming ones, but these stories just didn't even feel like stories (short or not).
It almost felt as if we were thrown into an early part of a book, and got 50 pages in, and then taken right back out of the book at the end of a chapter just as abruptly.

The writing was all quite good and the narrator was excellent!!
But the stories fell so incredibly flat. a couple kept my interest fairly well (and by a couple, I actually mean only 2 - maybe 3), but even those endings turned out to be letdowns.
The one with the dogs about the young man finding the tinder box was probably the only short story that I was truly interested in, but I didn't understand that ending at all. I think I may have missed something from the beginning, which maybe is another sign of how I would tune out so much.

Maybe they all had a deeper poetic or spiritual meaning that was lost on me, but pretty sure they're just bad =)


But I can't stress how good Christina Williams was as the narrator - so good I actually looked up other books she's narrated to hear more, but seems like she's been a bit cursed with underwhelming reads...
I will keep an eye on her though in the future.
But I will not be seeking out any of the authors in this books for any further reading.