The Merry Spinster by Mallory Ortberg

This book was so disappointing! Look at that beautiful cover. It has a cool (if not overdone) premise to match-twisted retelling of fairytales. Alas, many of the stories in this are just not up to scratch.

This is a relatively short collection and so I'm going to do things a little differently to how I normally review short stories. Instead of going over each story in detail, I'm just going to talk about them generally in comparison to each other and similar things I've read.

So the first story is definitely one of the strongest and unfortunately this led to a large part of my disappointment. 'The Daughter Cells' is kind of like if Lemony Snicket retold The Little Mermaid and all the dark joy that implies. It had a bunch of quotable stuff and used the fairytale to make matter-of-fact, humourous commentary on society. I was hoping all the stories would have this tone and while they kind of do, very few have such a coherent and detailed story to go along with it.

'The Thankless Child' is next (a retelling of Cinderella sort of) and I enjoyed it enough until the ending happened. It was very abrupt and I had no idea what it meant, despite reading it twice. This highlights one of the main issues with many of these stories-they don't appear to have a point. This could be because they are all mixes of several tales (the inspiration for each story is listed at the back which is very cool) and so having not read a lot of the original tales, it may be that stuff gets lost for me. However, I don't believe this is a valid excuse as the story really should stand alone.

'Fear Not' was amusing, yet confusing again and forgettable (although it was inspired by the Bible and so felt like one of the more unique tales). 'The Six Boy Coffins' was finally another story that had a decent plot and a clear ending. This was extremely powerful and again, it used the fairytale element to make a comment about society in a very strong way.

'The Rabbit' follows this and was my favourite story in the whole collection. It is a seriously creepy retelling of The Velveteen Rabbit and I think the simplicity of focusing on one story works in its favour. I will not be forgetting that one anytime soon.

'The Merry Spinster' was a very pointless retelling of Beauty and the Beast with an amusing writing style but it really went absolutely nowhere. I don't even remember 'The Wedding Party' (I finished this book two days ago) and the remaining four stories are all very similar in that they are creepy but again, ultimately pointless or unclear in what they are trying to say.

Overall, I wish I could love this collection more. It has a few really good stories and it shows so much promise in terms of Ortberg's writing style. I just wish it wasn't so hit and miss.

Overall Rating:

.5