What a gorgeous and enlightening book! A few years back I studied fairy tales as part of a uni course but I never read about salons or the women behind fairy tales decades before the Grimm Brothers and Perrault were on the scene. These women and the feminist origins of these stories deserve to be heard and it seems apt with many women fighting for their rights, 2025 is the year to tell them.
The beautiful illustrations compliment the short biographies of seven conteuses (female storytellers) and a sample of their stories. It is highly readable and leaves you mesmerised by their imagination and uplifted by the messages they have weaved within the tales. Forget Disney, these are the fairy tales we need to discover.

I can't wait to have a physical copy to own and reread.

I really enjoyed this book. I loved the nonfiction stories of the women and I enjoyed their fairy tales as well. The illustrations are beautiful. I wish that there was more backstory on these ladies (not the fault of the author, just the fault of keeping good records of women in those days.) As with all anthology type books, some were more interesting than others.
Thank you Netgalley, Jane Harrington, the illustrator, and the publisher for this eARC.

Very interesting from what I could read! Unfortunately, the formatting was a little wonky which made some of the chapters feel either out of order or incomplete. I'm sure this will be fixed prior to publication and I very much look forward to picking up a copy in August so I can get the full experience.

If I could give this book 3.5 stars, I would. I found the information to be very intriguing, and I enjoyed the sarcasm and wit in Harrington's narrative voice.

The beginning of the book was really fantastic, but as pages went by, I became rather bored. More so with the fairy tales themselves than that of Harrington's commentary. The novels we read today are written so differently than those of old, and I think that evolution has come from past writings feeling less relatable or personable. That was truly the trouble I had in enjoying this read in it's entirety. I liked reading about each author's personal life and how it correlated with the stories they wrote, but the fairy tale inserts themselves didn't do it for me. I would be interested in reading more of Jane Harrington's work.

I love fairy tales, and there were ones here I'd never heard of, yet along read. I think that it was an excellent selection. I think I'd have liked more info about each of the authors and how they fit together to showcase more of the 'fairy tale resistance' as the book seemed to be more focused on the fairy tales than that aspect of it.