'You make deals with God. You make deals with the Devil. You're not fussy. But as a wise man once said: "It's the saying you don't care what you get what gets you jiggered." So you say it, and you're jiggered, but what you give birth to is a hedgehog. It's prickly and its cry is a noise so terrible that you wish someone would scrape fingernails on a blackboard to give you some relief.
'In a fairytale, the only good mother is six feet under. All the others are bad news.
'A fairytale mother will exchange her first-born child for a handful of leafy greens. And if times get tough, she'll walk her babes into the woods and leave them there.
'But mothers of today do no such things. Do they?
'In this collection of heart-breakingly honest stories, the mothers of the Brothers Grimm are brought - with wit, subversiveness and lyrical prose - into the here and now.
Danielle Wood turns four fairytales on their heads and makes them exquisitely her own.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph:
Nobody's mother can't not never do nothing right.
–Liz Lochhead
'This article examines three fairy-tale texts that foreground women’s roles in Australia. We argue that although Kathleen Jennings’s Flyaway (2020) and Danielle Wood’s Mothers Grimm (2014) and her short story “All Kinds of Fur” (2021) are feminist insofar as they center women’s stories, they are limited by the extent to which they depict women working collaboratively. Although the fairy tale has the potential to disrupt patriarchal norms, these narratives offer constrained stories of women’s lives in which collaboration is possible but often fails to live up to its feminist potential to overturn conservative ideologies of femininity and power.' (Publication abstract)
'This article examines three fairy-tale texts that foreground women’s roles in Australia. We argue that although Kathleen Jennings’s Flyaway (2020) and Danielle Wood’s Mothers Grimm (2014) and her short story “All Kinds of Fur” (2021) are feminist insofar as they center women’s stories, they are limited by the extent to which they depict women working collaboratively. Although the fairy tale has the potential to disrupt patriarchal norms, these narratives offer constrained stories of women’s lives in which collaboration is possible but often fails to live up to its feminist potential to overturn conservative ideologies of femininity and power.' (Publication abstract)
