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Tapestry of Tales  

Book review by Sarah Hayes

A young woman cloaked in red visiting her grandmother is warned to beware of wolves. A prince and his aide venture through the countryside to free a sleeping princess from a castle surrounded by thorns. For the love of a human man, a mermaid sacrifices her tail and her voice. At night, twelve princesses dance so much and so long that their shoes fall apart on their feet. These may sound like the typical characters of your everyday fairy tale – but they are not. In fact, with a little twist of the words on the page, the heroes and heroines of stories long past turn into something brand new but just as enthralling.

As Tapestry of Tales shows, even the oldest of stories can be looked at in a new way. Sometimes, when you change the perspective of the story, the heroine doesn’t seem so fair or the hero so noble and sometimes the villain comes out looking rosier than her detractors. Like in real life, every story has two sides and more than one way to tell it. When you see the witch holding the beautiful princess captive isn’t evil at heart and the woodcutter lending a hand to the little lost girl in the woods isn’t innocent – well, it makes you wonder what other fairy tales hide another facet to them.

With this book, Sarah Deckard has put some creative and decidedly dark spins on classic fairy tales – from Sleeping Beauty to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Her writing style is lavishly descriptive and thick with vivid imagery that seems apropos for her rehashed fables, which have all taken on a somber (if not outright sinister) accent. Some stories have an effective punch, while others get lost in their own detailed prose and lack impact. Having said that, the stories with the most striking affect are the ones that linger in the mind long after that particular tale is done; I found the retakes on Little Red Riding Hood (Beware of Wolves) and Sleeping Beauty (The Prince and the Thorns) the most effective of the collection. Deckard has shown, as illustrated in the final tale of this volume, that new things can spring up out of things old and forgotten – and that out of the fairy tales of olden times, new ones can still be dreamt of and told to generations to come.

Tapestry of Tales: Classic Fairy Tales Retold
Book Review by Amber Stults

Tapestry of Tales: Classic Fairy Tales Retold by Sarah Deckard is not for children unless you want to scare them into staying awake. The tone of her stories perfectly mimics the cheery tales of old but very few have “happily ever after” endings.

More than one character wonders if the fairy tales they’ve heard are told from the wrong point of view or have incorrect details. They find out firsthand if the tales were correct or not. For instance, Sleeping Beauty’s tale is retold from the prince’s point of view. He’s a wanderer and uses his lover to find out more information about the fortress protected by magical thorns to prevent a prince from wakening the princess inside.

Other tales are alternate versions. Snow White goes to live with a family of odd Dwarves with names like Trippy, Sappy and Freaky. One story which stood out for me was “Beware of Wolves”. In this tale, Little Red Riding Hood discovers wolves come in more than one form. It’s a dark interpretation and days later won’t leave my mind.

Tapestry of Tales

Book review by A. R. Braun

In Tapestry of Tales, Sarah Deckard gives us a multitude of protagonists and antagonists to entertain us deep into the night with the timeless writers’ question, What if? What if the elder brother of twelve sisters becomes a necromancer and tries to destroy them by dancing them to death? What if when a princess kisses a frog, it brings her to ruin? What if waking Sleeping Beauty invites a sanguine doom?

Sarah’s warped fairy tales bring to mind yarns I learned in school with a fresh and evocative twist. The lusty, violent and sometimes perverted plot twists are something you’ve never read before, though you’ve perused the basic plots. “Zodiac Dancers” brings the reader to a hidden underworld of dangers. “The Enchanted Kiss” makes the reader question selfishness. “The Sleeper” ends in a way you won’t see coming, showing her expertise when working in the dark fantasy genre.

I found the collection quite refreshing, a genre I don’t usually read but was able to enjoy whole-heartedly. The tome is not predictable or tiresome, the stories bringing to mind morals, questioning avarice and narcissism and evoking surprise and sometimes shock when the endings are revealed. I definitely recommend this to any fantasy aficionado.