All fairy tale lovers have a fairy tale as a nemesis, and so do authors of fairy tale retellings.

Kate Stradling’s nemesis must be the Grimms’ fairy tale “King Thrushbeard.” I say that half-jokingly because she’s already done three retellings of it to date. And when an author returns to the same fairy tale again and again, it’s for one of two reasons: either they like it very much, or it bothers them very much.

Which of the two applies to Kate’s case? You’ll have to read the interview I did with her and draw your own conclusions.

I myself have a few fairy tales as my nemeses, amongst them “King Thrushbeard.” I have a theory about why it’s such a difficult tale for retellers to crack: the trap it sets is the temptation to whitewash two of its three morally grey main characters. The original fairy tale works precisely because all three—the king, the princess, and Thrushbeard—are at fault, all three are unlikable, and the redemption at the end is imperfect but earned. Strip that moral complexity away to make a romance more palatable to the modern readership, and the whole structure collapses.

Stradling fell into this trap twice before, in my opinion, finally sidestepping it in her second attempt, Thrushbeard, the retelling I’m going to focus on in this review.

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