Mothers Grimm

Mothers Grimm

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.



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.

Mothers Grimm
Allen and Unwin
Author: Danielle Wood
ISBN: 9781741756746
RRP: $27.99