A sly, cheeky and blackly comic novel about mothering, heartache, heartbreak, desire, love and death.
'Danielle Wood has turned four well-known fairy tales inside out and upside down, shaking out their secrets in order to illuminate the hidden fears and desires of four very modern women. Psychologically acute and mordantly witty, the stories in 'Mothers Grimm' unsettle the reader with their too-close-to-the-bone truths one moment, and cause a wry smile of recognition the next.' Kate Forsyth, bestselling author of Bitter Greens
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.
About the Author
Danielle Wood was born in Hobart in 1972. Danielle has an arts degree from the University of Tasmania, and a PhD from Edith Cowan University. She has worked as a journalist, as a producer with ABC Radio, and as a media officer for Tasmania's Parks and Wildlife Service.
Her first novel, The Alphabet of Light and Dark won the 2002 The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award, was the winner of the 2004 Dobbie Literary Award, commended in 2004 in the FAW Christina Stead Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the 2004 Commonwealth Writer's Prize in the Best First Book category for the SE Asia and South Pacific Region, and nominated for the 2005 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Her latest novel, Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls was published by Allen & Unwin in 2006. Danielle is currently teaching creative writing at the University of Tasmania.
Industry Reviews
Psychologically acute and mordantly witty, the stories in "Mothers Grimm" unsettle the reader with their too-close-to-the-bone truths one moment, and cause a wry smile of recognition the next. -- Kate Forsyth, bestselling author of Bitter Greens
Wood writes with acute insight into the inner lives of women, and all in prose so precise and crystal-cut, the whole shines with an unsettling beauty... Stories about our lives, our times, but their roots are dark, knotted, and ancient, hidden away under the concrete * Sydney Morning Herald *
A brilliant exploration of the modern pressures of parenthood. With satirical glee, Wood skewers the archetypical notion of the good mother. * Big Issue (Australia) *
Subversive re-imaginings of four fairytales from the Brothers Grimm collection... The stories are dark and funny, and the mothers - with their emotional struggles with issues such as child care - are instantly recognisable. * Daily Telegraph (Australia) *
