I am not the intended middle grade audience for this so I am reviewing it from an adult perspective and as someone who has read plenty of fairytales.

This is a good mixed bag of Western fairytale retellings with some cool concepts, new twists and diverse backgrounds that I was happy to see and that add a new dimension to these stories. Chainani's writing has lots of charm and whimsy, and the only thing that irked me was that there were no dialogue quotations when the characters were speaking. He gets a few points down for that. But since these are fairytales with long-held recognizable archetypes and not full-length novels where there is an expected differentiation between dialogue and prose, I decided to let this pet peeve of mine slide and finished the book anyway.
 
We see retellings of:
Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Hansel & Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Rumpelstiltskin and Peter Pan. 

I love fairytales and this is a collection I'm glad I picked up. I think Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel & Gretel, and The Little Mermaid were my favourites ⭐️ . Red Riding Hood was great at showing girls finding ways to escape from the rigid expectations placed on them. Sleeping Beauty was a queer prince with a magic vampire(?) boyfriend. Confusing as to what/how the blood and rose thing worked but good imagery for sure. And a baby shows up at the end, so magical mpreg? Nice. Hansel and Gretel are reimagined as Indian children who are tricked to go into the forest by their wicked stepmother after a famine. The witch that burns at the end of the story is not the one with the house made of sweets. Although the ending for The Little Mermaid story is really open-ended, but maybe that was Chainani's intention. It's less a traditional fairytale structure and more a confrontational dialogue between the mermaid and the sea witch. The sea witch makes a valid argument.

I have to say, though, the retellings of Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Peter Pan especially(!) were the ones I did not like. Bluebeard's was good, and had the right amount of tension for a Bluebeard retelling, but for some reason I kept thinking that some sort of triggering (pedophilic) content was going to show up, but it didn't, aside from the murdered bodies, of course. Peter Pan's, well, actually, Wendy's story, since she was the narrator and not Peter like it was in the original book, just made me really sad. That last story was more a tragedy than anything else.

I haven't read anything by Chainani before this but I might pick something else up by him 🙂  

i think fairytales fundamentally have a sense of terror to them, as a kid this seemed obvious yet unimportant, but as you get older you start to question what it actually is you should be so afraid of. i adored these stories and i know i’ll  come back to them.

"Beasts and Beauty" by Soman Chainani is a great collection of fairy tales! They're all somewhere between retellings and reimaginings in the best possible way.

Some of them are gender bent and some of them are queer bent (yay! 🏳️‍🌈), but that isn't the point of them. These are all the stories you know, but they're told in a way that makes them so much deeper and darker and *better*.

Anyway, Peter Pan, of all things, made me cry, and I definitely recommend this book.