Well, I don’t always give this book as a gift, but I’ve done it a couple of times. In Kissing the Witch, subtitled Old Tales in New Skins, Emma Donoghue re-imagines thirteen well-known fairy tales. This time around, princes and kings are either mad or maddeningly superfluous, and the women in these stories discover themselves despite the men, not because of them. Having recently seen Maleficent, I have to wonder if the script-writers were in some way inspired by Donoghue’s book.

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