This is an interesting, inspired-by-true-events story of how modern fairytales first started. In the court of Louis XIV, Charles Perrault meets in a literary circle with key members of the royal court. While what is discussed is subject to a traitor feeding stories to the King, it helps start the stories we now know are central to our culture.

Thank you to the publisher for the arc!


I didn't realize back when i requested this that this was historical fiction. big yikes. this was not for me.

I wrote a paper on the comte de fees of Monsieur Perrault and Madame D’Aulnoy in college, and I would have loved to have this wildly imaginative interpretation of their real lives enmeshed with their stories to add to all of the bizarre and delightful lore connected to their work.

We’ve seen a lot of authors attempt to make the Grimm brothers characters in a fairy tale reinterpretation, but Marie and Charles rarely show up in this context, and this book does a wonderful job of making the authors part of the story.

Setting this at the Versailles court of Louis XIV was a terrific and well-executed idea, and I loved how the author blended the lives of the authors and their time at court with the events of the incredible fairy tales they penned.

The Modern Fairies transports us to the literary salons of 17th-century France—safe spaces where intellectuals could share thoughts and writings away from the French court of Louis XIV. We meet a variety of characters whose tales provide an escape and ignite France’s literary community but also put the storytellers in grave danger. This is a slim read yet it tackles complex issues like sexism, censorship, and authoritarianism. It’s entertaining, scandalous, tragic, and fascinating as it is deeply rooted in true history. A masterfully written ode to the art and power of storytelling.

Clare Pollard's The Modern Fairies is a captivating historical fiction that brings to life the glittering and dangerous world of 17th-century Parisian salons.

Centered around Marie d'Aulnoy's enchanting gatherings, the novel delves into the lives of a group of intellectuals, including the renowned Charles Perrault, who use fairy tales as a mask for their complex realities. As they weave magical stories, their own secrets and scandals begin to unravel, creating a suspenseful atmosphere heightened by the ever-present threat of royal intrigue and censorship. A lurking spy adds a layer of danger as the characters navigate a treacherous social landscape.

This is a sparkling gem of a novel that effectively intertwines the magical world of fairy tales with the gritty realities of 17th-century France. The author deftly captures both the opulence of Versailles and the stark poverty of the masses, creating a vivid and immersive portrait of the era. I am impressed that she was able to accomplish this feat in as slim a novel as she did.

The novel’s greatest strength lies in its skillful integration of fairy tales into the narrative. The characters’ shared love of storytelling adds depth and complexity to their relationships, while also providing a fascinating glimpse into the origins of some beloved fairy tale tropes. The tales often reflect the personality or background of the storyteller, giving the reader deeper insight into each character.

While the plotting is ultimately solid, the novel’s beginning is somewhat disjointed. It takes a few chapters to establish the central conflict and introduce a cast of characters that can be overwhelming at times. Despite these small drawbacks, The Modern Fairies is a delightful read that offers a fresh perspective on a well-trodden historical period.

This review will be shared to Goodreads, Amazon, and Instagram on July 31, 2024.

I admit that I was taken by the cover – and that is what made me want to read this book, first and foremost. Second was the synopsis. Totally intrigued by it. I wanted to eat all of those cakes and pastries and delicacies sitting in Madame Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's salon, listening to fairy stories, but not exactly as I knew them. Clare Pollard undertook great care and research to bring some of the stories that once noblewomen, created and shared, with some based on folklore, and other entirely imaginative. Each of the chapters is named after a fairy tale, they they are told in particular ways, often with nuances to potential real-life occurrences and to those what frequented these salons, and in reference to Madame d’Aulnoy herself. How else could you get away with bad mouthing the monarchy without losing one’s head? There were risks to speaking about these things behind and outside of closed doors, as much as there was a risk to potentially describing their own destiny with each tale told.

The fairytales were almost a cover for what was really going on between an among the salon visitors. They were almost a front, or a veil to the secrets that they harboured. Incidentally, I was surprised at how many poisonings occurred during time, and was quite amused about their ‘coincidental’ fairy tale references with the events of the salon members.

A very interesting genre conversion between historical fiction and fairy tale retellings of sorts. Not everything that glittered was gold, and not everything that was calculated was cold.

Guys!! This was such a pleasant and fun surprise!!
I love the historical aspect of fairytales in this book. I feel like had fun while also learning something new and it was done in such a refreshing way. The prose were amazing. I’m so excited to annotate my hard copy when it ships.

This is mostly about women secretly discussing fairytales in a salon in Paris and there are parts that will absolutely make you laugh out loud! It’s interesting to catch a glimpse at how tales evolve from passage of time. This IS based on real events. It’s an adult kind of fairytale in its own way. Such a great read to mix up my monotony! Highly recommend trying this one.
4.5

Will be posting on socials right before review date.

Claire Pollard has penned a gorgeous, twisty novel about France in the 17th century in The Modern Fairies. We meet a large cast of characters, mostly women, who meet at a salon to tell stories that are forbidden by the King's rules. Tensions are high at court after a run of poisonings and the characters that make up Modern Fairies all have their own secrets to protect. The prose in this was gorgeous and while I was unfamiliar with Pollard's writing before, I will surely seek her out now.

For fans of twisty books jam packed with historical detail and female characters who aren't always walking the straight and narrow, The Modern Fairies is a book that leaves you thinking about it for days after you finish reading it.

I signed up for NetGalley just to request this book and was pleasantly surprised to receive this ARC!

I saw someone on the clock app say that this book is for readers who loved “when we lost our heads” by Heather O’Neill and I would second that recommendation.

Read The Modern Fairies if you’re a fan of: women’s wrongs, fables and fairy tales, messy entanglements, and social commentary.

In France, during the reign of the Sun King, a group of women, and a few trusted men, gather in a literary salon to share whimsical and irreverent stories. Censorship is prevalent during this time, and it’s dangerous to be caught speaking even remotely critically of Louis XIV, but salons like Madame d’Aulnoy’s are largely dismissed because they are seen as silly women telling silly stories. That is, until someone begins spilling their secrets.

It took me a minute to get into this one, I think because it’s a larger cast of characters than I am used to reading, and a lot of names to keep track of. I found myself skimming at times because it got somewhat wordy, but that says more about my own attention deficit than the quality of the writing. The imagery is so poetic and vivid, whether the author is describing places or food or clothing. She doesn’t romanticize the era, but the satire isn’t heavy handed either. You can tell she researched extremely thoroughly but also wasn’t afraid to take creative liberties. The result is a wry, unapologetic snapshot of womanhood in the seventeenth century, with characters we can relate to no matter how many years separate us. Bravo!!

I’m a huge fan of the author and couldn’t wait to read The Modern Fairies. I really loved this book. I enjoyed the structure of the book, how the fairytales were interwoven with events in Paris creating a rich, complex narrative. I also loved the fact that one of the main characters is Charles Perrault. I studied his fairytales for my OU degree and love them so this delighted me. I also loved the fact the book is set in Paris, a city I adore. I went on holiday to Paris for a week many years ago and fell in love with the dazzling city of lights. So this ticked another box for me. I was engrossed from start to finish and didn’t want to stop reading this book. I loved the characters, the secrets, the lies, the Parisian lifestyle and of course, the fairytales. I’d recommend this book.

DNF - Overwritten, with a narrators voice that sounds like a dry history text book and characters that are flat.

eARC provided by publisher via NetGalley.

This was one of my most anticipated reads of the year and it very much did not disappoint. A beautiful story that starts out shiny and glittering like a glass ornament but reveals a depth and viscerality that made it all the more real and all the more captivating. Pollard is reminiscent of Forsyth here (thinking specifically of Bitter Greens), another great contemporary fairy tale author but with a unique eye for detail that makes the story her own completely.

A novel set around Madame d'Aulnoy's salon, a precious intellectual bubble on the froth of Versailles, and one of the major tributaries feeding into the fairy tale as we now know it - indeed, the one where that name for them was born. Except that it's only really a novel in so far as that's a form which can encompass most things; to better fit its subject, this is a tale, composed of other tales, with a teller not shy of making their presence felt - something which excuses the sort of anachronisms playing to a modern crowd that can otherwise throw me right out of a historical novel, like characters picking up on the subtext of Bluebeard and discussing it in terms we'd recognise immediately upon having heard its first reading. But then, it's also in part a story about creative writing groups - how wonderfully helpful they can be sometimes, and how really not at others; the bonds when the mix is right, but also that one guy everyone else wishes they'd never invited. And if that feels like it would appeal to a limited audience, then like the best tales, so many other things are here too, love and bereavement and hypocrisy, the way power imbalances in society poison relationships, the precarity even of the privileged class within a totalitarian regime. I don't know whether it helped or hindered my enjoyment that it's not long since I read Nicholas Jubber's The Fairy Tellers, which was much broader in its scope but did introduce me to much of this cast - though even without that Charles Perrault at least would have been a recognisable name thanks to Angela Carter, an acknowledged influence here. But I fair raced through it, even while feeling the stiletto wit of the narration perhaps suited the poison sweetshop of the Sun King's court better than the fairytales themselves. Which, to judge from the epigraph, may have been exactly Pollard's intent.

(Netgalley ARC)

"Lauren Groff's Matrix meets Ophelia Field's The Favourite in this wry, sexy, and sharp historical novel - inspired by true events - featuring an elite group of Paris intellectuals who perform fairy tales that will change the course of literature - and put both the storytellers and their closely kept secrets in grave danger.

Why don't they tell you it is the beautiful princess who becomes the evil queen; that they are just the same person at different points in their story?

At a safe distance from the intrigues of courtly life at Louis XIV's Versailles, an intellectual crowd of mostly women have been gathering in a Parisian home to share what hostess Marie D'Aulnoy herself has christened contes de fées: fairy tales. Recently ousted from court and still raw from the death of his beloved wife, Charles Perrault finds companionship and creative camaraderie at the salon, where he eagerly joins the storytellers. Their hostess is impressive, fiercely intelligent, but somehow unreadable. She is harboring secrets of her own: sold off as a child in marriage to a brutal baron, imprisonment, scandal. Despite the vicious Versailles gossip, Marie has mysteriously been allowed to return to polite society and establish her salon in the heart of Paris.

A devastating winter soon sweeps in, bringing with it all kinds of rumors and fears. A spate of poisonings at Versailles has led to several arrests, and no matter how high born the suspect, it seems no one is safe. Paranoia stokes the King's insecurities, and there is a wolf among the salon's members - someone more dangerous than any force they could conjure in their own tales, watching and waiting, reporting on the secret goings-on, and threatening to destroy them one by one.

Brilliant and bawdy, witty and wise, Modern Fairies is a dazzling novel of stories within stories, familiar tales spun with fresh and provocative meaning, perfect for fans of Jenny Offill, Deborah Levy, and Angela Carter."

I mean, I'm all about stories within stories, but will it have copious nun sex? I'm just asking, because that is a large portion of Lauren Groff's Matrix.

dnf

I absolutely adored this author's book Delphi which is why I requested this.

unfortunately this wasnt for me.
Whilst I enjoyed the fairytales themselves (deliciously dark), the scenes in the literary salon and those character's conversations and musings about the fairytales bored me - I felt the writing was quite dense and I think the style used wasn't my cup of tea.

For anyone else who grew up with Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, this will be so much fun! Pollard crafts a quirky litfic story set in the 1600s but very modernized language - think Coppola’s Marie Antoinette movie.

This is based on real events involving Perrault and the women around him, and how they crafted his famous fairy tales around the reign of Louis XIV. It’s an interesting take, and a shorter novel that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Pollard is definitely a writer I’ll be reading from again!

I totally loved Clare Pollard's Delphi and after reading the blurb of The Modern Fairies, I knew I just had to read this! This book did not disappoint!
Paris during the reign of Louis XIV, people started organising literary salons. I think the time period is very interesting, so many things are happening. The salon of Marie D'Aulnoy specializes in comtes de fees, fairy tales. As hard as people have it, they can spend some time together telling eachother stories and forgetting their problems. Linking some of the fairy tales back to the events of the people attending the salons was a good find. It also shows that fairy tales are not only for children.
From now on, Clare Pollard is an author I will automatically buy!
Thank you for the chance to read this book before publication.

I think Claire Pollard will become an auto-buy author for me, I’ve enjoyed both her books and love the richness of her prose.

Here, the historical and the fantastical combine in the very best way, with the salons of 17th century Paris coming alive in all the bawdy, wild ways you’d want them to. Im not typically into “fairy tale” retellings or references in books but somehow here it felt captivating rather than alienating (as a reader who can be wary of that genre).

The overarching theme of storytelling, of who gets to tell stories or subvert stories in the face of darker times, was nicely explored. This was such a unique and wonderful read! Thanks so much for my early copy!

Not my cup of tea, I'm afraid, though the "blurb" sounded fascinating. The writing is a little too elaborate and "precious" for me with an overly wrought (for me) plot. Since I didn't really care for the book, I will not repost elsewhere. Sorry!