The Snow White tales that Tatar presents here are not as slick as the confections of the Grimms and Disney… What Tatar urges in her deft and thoughtful introduction is that we read each variation, whether it is from West Africa, Afghanistan or China, with equal attention… This provides a way of thinking about how fairy tales reveal more than the essentially early 20th-century upper bourgeois insights of Freudian psychoanalysts. There are plenty of examples of mother–daughter rivalries in these tales to be sure, but there is so much more of the material and temporal world—food, hunger, disease, and war—too.

- Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

[A] fascinating collection of tales…Shocking yet familiar, these stories of regeneration and transformation even when written down retain the secret whisper of storytelling. This is a properly magical, erudite book that follows Snow White’s trail into the darker forests of the human psyche in which she originated.

- Lucy Lethbridge, Literary Review

Going to the root of a story is a journey to the very core of the soul. Reading across the world, the inimitable Maria Tatar offers us a maze of mothers and daughters and within that glorious tangle an archetype with far more meaning than we imagine when we say ‘Snow White.’

- Honor Moore, author of <i>Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury</i>,