Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins is a collection of fairy tales that transform the original stories into entirely new narratives. The stories are connected by a causal thread, with each successive tale serving as backstory to the preceding one. There are some typical hallmarks of fairy tales: talking animals, magical transformations, enchantment. Yet the stories are also grounded in realism, so that they feel both ancient and contemporary, timeless and timely. The fairy tales they’re based on are recognizable in most cases; others are less familiar—but it hardly matters since these stories stand on their own as compelling narratives of female resourcefulness and agency. And each story takes the narrative in unexpected directions creating a delightful reading experience. |
The book begins with a retelling of Cinderella which begins with this opening line: “Till she came it was all cold.” We meet a young woman grieving for her mother and haunted by “shrill voices” inside her head driving her to sweep and clean the empty house. Then a stranger who knew her mother arrives and things change. “My old dusty self was spun new. This woman sheathed me in blue velvet. I was dancing on points of clear glass.” Cinderella asks to attend the ball: “Isn’t that what girls are meant to ask for?” When the prince proposes, she has a completely unforeseen—but absolutely perfect—response that reshapes the tale entirely. |
Here we meet a young wife whose husband insists on keeping her “safe” by trapping her inside the house when she becomes pregnant.
One day she finds a swallow near death who flew in the chimney. She nurses the bird back to health. “I could have kept it beside me, a silk-tethered plaything, but what would have been the use of that? I took it to the highest window in the house and let it out.”
I especially enjoyed the retelling of Snow White. She and her stepmother are initially close and it is the king who teasingly introduces a competition between them by asking, “How am I to judge between two such beauties?” When the king dies, the queen asks Snow White to swear fealty, but instead she runs away: “I decided to leave it all to her, and leave her to it. I filled my hems with gold pieces and slipped away.” She meets a gang of woodsmen and becomes their cook and housemaid. When the queen visits her, and Snow White neglects her duties, the woodsmen chastise her and warn her to stay away from the queen. This is ultimately a tale that contrasts how women serve men versus when women create solidarity with each other. |
A young spinster is subject to her mother’s greed until the mother sickens and dies. On her deathbed, her mother says, “if I have trodden you underfoot it was to wash out the dirt. If I have trampled you, it was to mesh your fibers into something useful.”
The spinster can’t keep up with the orders after her mother’s death so she hires a simpleton to help. With an employee, the spinster starts flirting with customers and enjoying life. When the simpleton tries to leave, the spinner begs her to stay, offering more and more incentives, until she promises her firstborn child. In the end it is the simpleton who proves wise.
A reimagining of “Sleeping Beauty” hides behind “The Tale of the Needle.” It begins, “When I was the age that you are now, I had never done an hour’s work.” The narrator is an imperious princess: “The only lesson I had to learn was the list of my virtues: how my face was the fairest, my wit the sharpest, my heart the most angelic, my singing the most comparable to a lark’s in all the land.” When she enters puberty, she becomes discontented and curious about the castle’s tower where she isn’t allowed. Her parents get her a kitten to distract her, but when the kitten scratches her, they have it drowned. Furious, the princess finds the hidden passageway to the tower and meets an old wise woman who offers to teach her to use a spinning wheel . . . |
“The morning after I saw this man in the marketplace I woke up sick to my stomach and decided I was in love.” Desperate, she visits the witch in a cave, demanding to become “a woman he could love.”
The witch says, “Whoever he is, he’s not worth what you’ll pay.” But the girl insists and the witch takes her voice. Later in the story the witch explains, “People never value what they get for free.”
The Starlit Wood, Mythic Journeys, Not a Princess, The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women
Novels based on fairy tale retellings:
Sistersong; The River Has Roots; A Sorceress Comes to Call; Thorn;
Thornhedge; Girl, Serpent, Thorn; The Book of Gothel