Two and Twenty Dark Tales by Georgia McBride and Michelle Zink

I love fairytales and their retellings. Granted, I prefer the re-tellings with happy endings, but there's something beautiful with the sad, darker ones. This collection, Two and Twenty Dark Tales takes the familiar Mother Goose rhymes and expands each of them into a short story. The advance version from NetGalley didn't have all the stories to be published, but I want to talk about some of the stories.

As Blue As The Sky And Just As Old, a re-telling of the Taffy rhyme and Sing A Song of Six Pence (you shouldn't need me to tell you where this is from) are the first two books in this anthology. Unfortunately, they're also two of the weakest books that I read. I admit I wasn't familiar with the Taffy Rhyme, but still, I understood very little of the story. Sing A Song of Six Pence had the same problem - both stories suffered from too little information. I had this unpleasant feeling that I was missing some important information the whole time I was reading those stories.

Sea of Dew was actually really sad. The original rhyme was quite long, but the author managed to turn it into a touching story. It's rather bleak though.

I think my favourite story was Tick Tok, about the mouse that ran up the clock. Even though it was short, it had an interesting plot, strong characters and a nice twist at the end.

Little Miss Muffet was also quite interesting. It had a completely different spin on the spider. The ending however, was a bit unbelievable. I didn't expect the twist, but I should say that wasn't much warning/hints as to the twist.

Wee Willie Winkie was one of the few stories where I didn't like the narrator. She was just too stubborn, and rude the the adults (I have this bias against rude protagonists). If you ask me, she got what came to her, which made it one of the endings that I was actually pleased at.

Overall, this is a collection of interesting stories. Not all are good, and if you just read the first two, you may not think much of the book. But overall, there are a more than a few gems in this book that make it a good read.

Disclaimer: I got this book free from NetGalley in exchange for a free and honest review.