Whether you prefer your fairy tales sweet, sassy, or tinged with sadness, ONCE UPON NOW will have a story to suit. Then there are the darker tales: the boys of a high-school football team get more than they bargained for in Mikaela Bender's siren story, and in Ali Novak's haunting story, Rory Briar is a 'sleeping beauty' in an Upper West Side tower, 'cursed' by her rare neurological condition. Other tales include RS Kovach's First Nations spin on The Six Swans and a sweet promposal-gone-wrong (then right) tale from Tammy Oja. Opening the anthology is JM Butler's spirited tale in which Bluebeard discovers he's no match for a feisty modern girl. The latter, 'My Love God Went to Hawaii and All I Got Was This Lousy Papaya', is by Debra Goelz, whose also published in the IMAGINES anthology, and it has her distinctive Rick-Riordan-for-Grownups wit and screwball inventiveness. The result is a fresh and often funny set of stories that riff on tales from Pinocchio to The Princess and the Pea. The genre is hot right now, thanks to everything from Marissa Meyer's LUNAR CHRONICLES to Lexa Hillyer's forthcoming SPINDLE FIRE, and for this anthology Simon&Schuster has turned to some of the most popular writers of Wattpad, the superpowered social reading and writing website. There is something for everyone in this delightfully varied and imaginative anthology of fairy-tale retellings.
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