From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.

Gender Swapped Fairy Tales (Hardback) by Jonathan Plackett

Despite this, you like story time – even though the kid is perfectly capable of reading their own stories: the intimacy of reading stories out loud, that special quiet time; the importance of modelling literacy and the arts in your family life; values that you teach through stories. It’s not just the words, of course: as every parent will tell you, the pictures are what really captures a kid’s imagination.

Anyone who is paying attention has seen rewritten, fractured, reversed, and original tales that use other gender(s) (including non-binary) and ethnicities and complex villains and etc. Huang’s taker reimagines the bandits from the classic Chinese novel as women and genderqueer warriors ready to break the law and take on their enemies. Especially for fairytales and stories that have been passed down from long ago, the gender roles depicted can be very normative and sometimes even problematic by our modern standards.

Gender Swapped Fairy Tales by Karrie Fransman, Jonathan Gender Swapped Fairy Tales by Karrie Fransman, Jonathan

Or your made-up story about the magical bird that helps children sleep is, according to the small reviewer in front of you, the worst story ever. You only need to mention the idea of Rapunzel's long hair being replaced with a man’s beard to grab some interest from me. zachętę do zastanowienia się nad światem — oraz że ujrzysz go z nieco innej perspektywy" i wiecie co? Reading the hardback is a joyous experience reminiscent of the pleasure of snuggling down with the original Lang books I repeatedly borrowed from the library. Ceri Radford wrote ‘even after just half an hour of reading manufactured tales with a cynical hat on, I started to get sucked into the belittlement of young men, beginning to expect them to be nothing but weak window-dressing.The main female characters in this series are all extremely clever and are presented very positively.

Gender Swapped Fairy Tales by Karrie Fransman | Goodreads Gender Swapped Fairy Tales by Karrie Fransman | Goodreads

But more fascinating – particularly if your children are too old and cynical for such an enterprise – is to read it yourself for what jars, what surprises, what seems implausible, what repels. Following the incredible success of Gender Swapped Fairy Tales they have taken that same simple step. It’s all very strange, and as other reviewers have pointed out, this also extends to the illustrations that seem happy to add makeup and gendered hairstyles to scenes that otherwise never had these elements originally.Again, the authors seem torn, at one point saying they wanted to update the text for contemporary readers, then later saying that it was important to preserve the stories in all their Olde English glory. Keen to see the magic in action, I read “Mr Rapunzel” to my niece Violet, six, over Zoom: “Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a woman came in, for he had never seen one before. Some of what I took from hearing fairy tales as a child: the pleasure of the telling and retelling; appre­­ciating narrative tension; suspending disbelief to enjoy books and movies; valuing creativity; imaginative play; the sense of continuity as each generation reads to the next. This new collection features gorgeous and thought-provoking artwork by Karrie Fransman, who explains in an introductory note that she “drew inspiration from the textiles and furniture of the countries and centuries in which the stories originated”. just as we're learning everywhere else, simply swapping male and female isn't enough; we have to realize how deep the imagery goes and how wide open the gender spectrum really is and stop thinking things are solved within a rigid binary.

Gender Swapped Fairy Tales - AbeBooks Gender Swapped Fairy Tales - AbeBooks

Pokazuje rzeczywistość, gdzie kobiety mogą być odważne i waleczne, a mężczyźni mogą być delikatni i uczuciowi.Instead, it confirms (for those who would not be surprised at the news) that princesses are just as good at finding their way through forests as princes. This book is great for breaking women out of the sexist stereotype, of needing a man to save them, only being good if they are beautiful, but I do not think it should be the only fairy tale book on a child’s shelf. Imagine a world where kings prick their fingers as they sew, wolves wear heels, and princesses race to rescue sleeping princes.