Review No.123 – The Wicked Wood

Tales from the Tower Volume Two: The Wicked Wood – Isobelle Carmody and Nan McNab (ed.)

Allen&Unwin, 2011

In this collection, fairy tales grow between cracks in the mundane surface of a city, a suburb, a small town. From the sinister presence of a wildly ambitious artist to the wolf hidden in plain sight, the mermaid who would trade anything for another life to the uncontrollable craving of two sisters to get theirs back, these are stories of hunger and betrayal, longing and hope.

This anthology is a companion volume to The Wilful Eye, which I read as a part of last year’s AWW Challenge, but has a noticeably different approach. All of these retellings take place in contemporary settings and the fantasy elements tend to be more understated – in a few, there are none at all. There is a similar tone to many of these stories that I personally would have preferred broken up by a wider range settings, but the slants each writer chose to take were interesting and for the most part effective. I particularly appreciated ‘Seventy-Two Derwents’ by Cate Kennedy and ‘The Ugly Sisters’ by Maureen McCarthy. Some of the original sources for this anthology are also slightly more obscure, such as ‘The Wolf and the Seven Kids’ and ‘The Fairy’s Midwife’. It’s good to see retellings that explore beyond familiar ground.