Neon’s A Doll A Day… Again (2020)

[neon_jellyfish]

Fabulous rant about fairytales & their sanitising down for a modern audience.

My favourite fairytale is Beauty and the Beast - when I step back and think about it, it raises a lot of questions similar to yours.
(Another favourite is 10 Dancing Princesses, also some not-great stuff about consent & forced marriage).

All 3 of your Sleeping Beauties are great, and nice books you have them posed with.

Thank you very much!

My favorite version of Beauty and the Beast is a Czechoslovak movie from 1978, it has serious horror vibes, and both the Beauty and the Beast are actually quite fleshed-out, and the Beast has sort of a split personality, a fairytale-ish one, but it still helps to make him relatable, as the struggles between his gentle human side and the beastly one are written quite well. Also, Beauty's father comes home to say goodbye and wants to go back to the Beast, but she learns about him having to pay for the rose with his life and runs away from home to find the Beast and save her father, so the annoying father-sends-his-child-to-certain-death-to-save-his-own-life problem doesn't come up here. And she's pure and good, but also has some weaknesses, she becomes afraid of the Beast, and tells him cruel things and runs away, but then realizes her mistake and returns, which makes her, at least for me, more believable.

I know 12 Dancing Princesses, but aside from liking the fancy trees and gorgeous ballgowns, it never did much for me.

Thank you! The books are Grimms' Complete Fairy Tales by Fall River Press, and Neil Gaiman's The Sleeper and the Spindle (that's the one with the beautiful full-page illustrations).

Edit after your edit: yes, that's the book and Chris Riddell is indeed the illustrator, I love his work.