This book--and I use the term loosely--is absolutely dreadful.
With the exception of "The Frog Princess," which is a tolerable tale about a frog that falls in love with a prince and finds a fairy to turn herself human--an effort that ends tragically, because love doesn't always fix everything--all of the stories are horrible. Not one would be fit for a juvenile (7-15, according to the American Library Association)...unless you're eager to explain to your seven-year-old why so many of the female leads are compelled to deal with rape or attempted rape, or why there are four pictures of five naked people. There's a topless mermaid in profile in "The Littlest Mermaid", the full-frontal nude shot (with pubic hair) of the Chinese empress in "The Empress's New Clothes," the full-frontal nude statue in "Fairy Gold", and a profile view of naked Adam with a contrapposto shot of naked Eve, both with their bits carefully concealed, in "How the Gods Met Their End."
In addition to it being grossly inappropriate for children, it also features the following female characters:
A queen whose gratitude nearly gets two people executed and DOES force them into perpetual servitude ("The She-Wolf");
An abused woman whose entire life centers around men (her father, her two lovers, her son, and the Robin Hood-like outlaw who provides her with an army) and who is perpetually told to leave abusive situations, rather than choosing to do so on her own ("Princess Questa");
A rude and shallow princess who mocks an intended suitor for being ugly and who is attacked, nearly raped, and almost murdered as a result, and a stepmother who claims to adore her stepdaughter but who nevertheless does nothing--despite her position as a respected sorceress and queen--when said suitor begs her for permission to murder the girl, preferring to leave the princess's rescue to seven male dwarves and not even bothering to tell the girl that she is in danger ("Snow Night");
A supposed "hero" who refuses to save other women from kidnapping and presumed death, demanding to know what's in it for her first ("Gorga and the Dragon");
A woman with such low self-esteem that she marries a magical animal because--as is overtly stated in the story--there's no chance he'll ever be prettier than her and therefore won't leave her ("Ugly and the Beast");
A girl who discovers a plot to eradicate humanity and conquer the world…and never does anything to prevent it or to alert people to the danger ("Jill and the Beanroot");
A woman who tries to become more aware and intellectually deeper, breaking with her materialistic and emotionally abusive partner—only to be physically threatened and abused by her new one, causing her to go back to the emotionally abusive materialist ("Barbidol");
An underage girl who nearly becomes a courtesan (because in this story, the magican posing as Whitewashed Female Aladdin's uncle also poses as a high-class pimp, and the mother of "Ala Dean" is fine with her daughter taking up that profession because courtesans meet so many powerful men) and who forces an entirely new political system, economy and social structure on her country without anyone's wishes or consent even being considered, disabling, in the process, the male genie who actually does the work--and while not bothering to save the boys and girls who were captured in lieu of taxes, because while she had lots of dreams for improving the country, freeing human beings from captivity and debt bondage just wasn't one of them ("Ala Dean and the Wonderful Lamp");
An arrogant princess whose tale is an incoherent mess combining the Biblical tale of Salome with the story of the Sumerian goddess Inanna and her journey to the underworld...which, in Walker's verision, is by way of Dante's inferno and pop culture, and which results in erasing the unpleasant consequences of Shaloma's actions, despite the fact that, in the stories of Salome and Inanna, the irrevocable consequences of their decisions are the point ("The Descent of Shaloma");
A fairy queen/goddess of weavers--Walker is convinced that all fairies and fairy queens were once goddesses--who provides woefully inadequate solutions to a young woman in danger from a sexual predator...and who apparently has no interest in helping or rescuing his other victims ("The Weaver");
A shapeshifter from the ocean who convinces a disabled man to get his arms cut off ("The Sea Witch");
The bullying innkeeper's daughter, who claims to be touched by the man's devotion to his lady but who seems awfully eager to maim him (see above);
The supposedly wise witch/fairy who sends a prince on a highly symbolic journey which ends with her threatening his life, an action that Walker agrees with, since she states her pro-bullying stance at the beginning of this chapter, saying "threats may be necessary to bring about sincere reformation" ("Prince Gimme and the Fairy of the Forest");
A witch who mocks sincere believers visits a religious oracle iin the belief that it is a con, in hopes of learning how it works so that she can con others--and it is a con, and she does learn how to con others ("The Oracle");
The princess who persuades her female partner to spend the rest of her life masquerading as a man for the princess's convenience--and neither one is LGBTQ, because Walker makes sure we know that ("Lily and Rose");
The three young women who are raped and murdered by a serial rapist-murderer because the living gargoyles of Paris regard their agony and death as more entertaining than stopping the serial killer...until he targets a fourth woman that a gargoyle is stalking/obsessed with ("The Gargoyle");
The axe-murdering grandma/priestess of the Mother Goddess who chops up two pedophiliac hunters who threaten her granddaughter with rape and then feeds their sliced and diced corpses to wolves that live near a village ("Little White Riding Hood");
The utterly useless Mother Goddess who can't bother to prevent the torture of her beloved humans or the usurpation of her own power ("How the Sexes Were Separated") by the Sky Father ("How the Sexes Were Separated");
A mermaid who abandons her family not out of any interest in the human world but out of greed and a conviction that remembering the prince's face moments after rescuing him is a sign of true love and who forces the prince to marry her despite his telling her that he has other obligations; the prince's mother, who suggests bigamous marriages with the prince's betrothed and with the mermaid; and the princess who elopes with her commoner lover while trying to ensure that neither her parents nor her people suffer for her actions--yet who is consistently described not only as unattractive in numerous ways but has has an ethnic slur (the G-word so often used to describe Romani people) used to describe her twice ("The Littlest Mermaid");
The daughter of a dead priestess of the Mother Goddess who magics up all the accoutrements she needs for the ball by putting assorted garbage in a hollowed-out pumpkin and then smearing menstrual blood all over the trash--and, if that isn't disgusting enough, also forces her stepsisters to live lives for which they are not suited, which is no better than them forcing her to be a servant, and compels everyone in the land to worship HER goddess and to revere HER mother's grave as a holy place.("Cinder-Helle");
The do-nothing fairy queen/goddess "Dea Mater" who--unlike the determined and proactive goddess Demeter in the Persephone story--goes to her bedroom when her daughter Corey is kidnapped by the Troll King and weeps helplessly for the remainder of the story, while Corey not only does nothing to try to free herself but sounds positively infantile whenever she speaks ("How Winter Came to the World");
Two sisters who are con artists not only humiliate an empress--the one mortal woman of color in this entire book--but are rewarded by the empress for doing so ("The Empress's New Clothes");
Three flower fairies whose defining characteristic is an insistence that every flower be pink--to the point where they will sic wasps on a hyperallergenic man who dares to oppose them ("The Three Little Pinks");
A tale plagiarized from Prosper Merimee's 1837 horror story "La Venus d'Ille," which is centered on a living statue of a goddess that kills a man ("Fairy Gold");
The unfortunate young mother who is fridged by one male god to further the plans of another selfish male god who wants to bear children--a woman who is never mourned, remembered, or even given a name ("How the Gods Met Their End"); and
Three African goddesses, one of whom is attired in a Wilma Flintstone outfit, who talk to various endangered animals about the awfulness of human males and the "white god, Yawalla" (an obvious expy for "Yahweh") and who eventually decide that the only way to save the animals is to convince all women to dominate men, to practice a form of eugenics by only breeding with gentler men, and " to laugh at men still ignorant enough to think rhinoceros horn would cure their impotence," because emotionally abusing the sexually insecure never has terrible consequences {"The White God"). Notably racist in its treatment of the three goddesses and of the people of Africa, the latter of whom have been effectively erased from existence.
There are also two other stories--"Thomas Rhymer" and "Sir Vivor and the Holy Cauldron"--which do not have particularly noteworthy female characters but which focus on holy uteruses (items that show up in many, many, MANY other stories) and, in the case of "Thomas Rhymer," a river of menstrual blood which must be traversed to reach Fairyland. Walker makes it appallingly clear that womanhood, in her eyes, involves conception and childbearing...and nothing else. This is not a feminist position; it is a reactionary one. Moreover, it excludes every woman who cannot or who chooses not to bear children, as well as all adoptive parents. I would not want to tell any girl or woman, cis or trans, that lack of fertility or inclination made them in any way inferior.
In addition to all of this, each story is prefaced with Walker's disjointed ramblings about the origins of the stories, which are not based on fact but on her poorly researched beliefs about mythology, coupled with her conviction that if one name resembles another, they must be the same person. Someone needs to sit Walker down and teach her that homophones--two or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling--actually exist.
I absolutely do not recommend this book. It is of appalling quality, less a series of stories than a series of dull, poorly written and steadily degenerating rants expressing the author's hatred of Christianity and men, while starring the most passive, useless, sexist female characters I have ever seen.
There are excellent fairy tales out there, both traditional and original, starring brave, intelligent, heroic girls and women of all races and cultures. Go read them. Do not waste your time on this.
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