The Last Day of the Month Book Club discussion

The books is written in a very stylised way - quite different from the original tales. How did you find the way it was written affected the stories inside? Did you enjoy the style change?

I enjoyed the style change, as it helped to shake things up a little - as soon as you begin a tale with "once upon a time" you are entering into a formulaic, fixed style that has to follow certain conventions. Changing the linguistic style allows the reader to feel that other changes will occur too, so they can no longer predict how the tale will turn out. Beautiful characters are no longer necessarily beautiful on the inside... step-mothers can be good rather than being doomed to be evil, and little pigs aren't always the ones you feel sorry for, when faced with the wolf.

I found this an easy read. I am not a big short story reader but this was a great Christmas read, when I had so much else on as I could pick it up and put it down easily. I liked the style even though it comes across as though it is American. It gave the faiytales a very different voice to the originals.

I really enjoyed the change of style, it was good to read a twist on familiar tales.