[In the following review, Hallissy asserts that the appeal of the selections in The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales lies in the stories' variations on established, traditional fairy-tale themes and elements.]

Like the Bible and Arthuriana, fairy tales stimulate creativity in ways that other literature does not; nobody rewrites Hamlet, but Job and Lancelot and Cinderella continually reappear in modern dress. Whereas the original fairy tales can be read on various levels by children and adults, these modern redactions are for adults only. These modern writers employ resonances from the reader's childhood with the conventional characters, images, and situations of the fairy tale as themes upon which they play variations.

The reader of modern fairy tales brings to the experience a mind already well populated by stock character types. As in the tabloid press, the doings of the royals are featured, princesses are beautiful, princes handsome. When people have children, they usually have either one (long-awaited and therefore special) or three (one of whom, usually the youngest, is differentiated sharply from the other two). Adult female types are shaped by the primordial images of the good and bad mother. The mortality rate of natural mothers is high, especially in childbirth, as is their rate of prompt replacement by evil counterparts. Old women—hags, crones, witches—have supernatural knowledge and power. The human characters of the fairy-tale world are supplemented by creatures from the other world: giants, elves, fairies. The landscapes are the familiar ones: the castle, the humble home, the fearful wilderness outside both.

With all the common elements shaken and stirred, the modern tales are inevitably read against the older versions. The fascination of Lurie's collection [The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales] lies in the variations played upon established patterns. Figuring out why, for example, a princess must endure a wicked auntie's curse by being exempted from the law of gravity (George Macdonald's “The Light Princess”), or must be smarter than the average but much too tall (Jeanne Desy's “The Princess Who Stood On Her Own Two Feet”), is the fun of it. The most noticeable divergences from type are the gender-benders. Since fairy-tales princes and princesses represent the essence of maleness and femaleness, to vary their nature is to question the nature of the categories themselves.

Fairy tales deal with elemental human experiences: love and loss; kindness and cruelty; the power of wishes; fear of the darkness, both without and within. In these tales as in the originals, the great revelations, for good or ill, most often take place in the house, within the family—the only setting considered worthy of tragedy by the ancient Greek dramatists. As Naomi Murchison writes in “In the Family,” “It was in the family to be seeing things that are not meant to be seen. And it was not nice for them, not at all. They could have done without seeing the most of what they saw.” Like their great predecessors, these modern fairy tales dramatize the darker side of childhood, the end of innocence.