I read this originally to recall how McKinley wrote "The 12 Dancing Princesses" much better than the book I read... the name of which I can't recall. I didn't like the book.
McKinley creates whole characters in only a few words ( I feel I know more about these characters than the ones if the novel!) and I love this version of the story. Her writing paints pictures.
I skipped "The Door in the Hedge" as it's never been a favorite (first cousins marrying and it goes on too long, for me), but I ADORE her version of "The Princess and the Frog" and the golden hart tale. McKinley writes women so well. She just writes well period. So good.
One star off for the first story.

The Door in the Hedge is a collection of fairytale short stories very much in line with the classics. The tone of the collection reads more like early middle grade stories than young adult. Think more like a bedtime story. I think I would have enjoyed this collection as a young kid, but I did not realize going into this now that the stories would skew so young and lack the teeth I expect in retold fairytales for young adults.

I found that the storytelling also lacked quality. The characters were all very static and the endings each felt super unearned. The protagonists don't succeed because they are clever or brave or kind, but because they are in the right place at the right time. The number of incredibly convient story turns and by-the-numbers plotting just felt strange coming from such an experienced author. It was disappointing.

A collection of four stories, all in an exquisite enchanting prose style. She has the voice down pat, it can draw you in on its own.

Two are retellings, one of "The Frog Princess" and the other of "The Twelve Dancing Princess," in which elements are added that shift the significance of events in the tale. I think the second is my favorite of this.

There's also an original tale about the fairies -- the Fair Folk -- and the last mortal land, where the fairies take infant boys and maidens nearly old enough to marry. And the royal family of that land.

And the fourth one also has some fairy tale elements, a magical hind in the woods, but I think it's the weakest of the four.

It's been ages since I've read pure fairytales (I loved the Andrew Lang's colored fairy books as a child) and while they definitely have some antiquated notions of romance and gender roles, McKinley still manages to describe magical worlds beautifully.

This is a collection of short stories and fairy tale retellings by Robin McKinley. Classic stories such as the Princess and the Frog, and the Twelve Dancing Princesses are joined by others such as the Hunting of the Hind, and the Stolen Princess.

I thought at first that all of these short stories were going to be connected in a way, but they weren't. This wasn't my favorite book. Some of the stories in this collection were new to me, and felt like they deserved more detail and attention instead of descriptions. They all seemed very rushed, particularly towards the end of each story, and the epilogues didn't feel like they added anything useful. this might be a good collection to someone else, but didn't grab my attention enough.

Contains: magic, suspense

Classic Robin McKinley

I have been a fan of McKinley's work since high school, and it never fails to awaken something in me. There's a magic in her work (which granted are mostly fairy tale retellings) that reminds me, even as an adult, what it felt like when I first fell in love with books, and felt myself transported. This is a smaller collection of retellings, but is beautifully rendered all the same. Go for it!

Four slim classic fairytales retold well, but without the spark of creativity that makes McKinley's fantasy special. The Princess and the Frog came closest, with names and motivation, but was so slight as to make little impression. The Twelve Dancing Princesses especially is an odd, forlorn tale I'd have liked to see made richer. These fairytale royalty are archetypes, not characters, and McKinley is usually very good at making characters out of outlines.

The Stolen Princess
"The whole silly idea of changelings was invented by lazy parents too far inland for any faintest whiff of faerie shores to have reached them; parents who cannot think of any other reason why their youngest, or middle, or eldest, or next-to-somethingest child should be so regrettable; they know they aren't to blame."

The Princess and the Frog

The Hunting of the Hind

The Twelve Dancing Princesses
"I have little of either youth or beauty to spend, and must make it up in caution."

This is a compilation of 4 short stories, some well known fairy tales, others not.
Robin McKinley is a most talented writer. Her words glide gracefully across the page and flow like a long and lovely poem. By the time you get to the end of the story you are almost in tears at the beauty of it all. You have this longing dazed look on your face. And then you shake yourself and scratch your head and say, "what? I don't get it." And you wonder if you missed something or if she is just like Lemony Snickett, purposefully leaving out important details to drive you crazy. But wait! There is an epilogue. This should clear things up. No. It just created even more questions. By the end of the first story in this book I felt like I had just experienced a fuzzy dream. The rest of the stories had a little more detail but are just so silly. They all gaze into each others eyes understandingly without having to say a word. They just know they are in love even though they have never met, because the looks they give each other speak louder than dialogue. Dialogue is what is really missing in this book (and in others of her books I might add). There is hardly any. There is also a heavy seriousness throughout the stories that is almost funny if it wasn't so tiresome and depressing. It feels like a dramatic soap opera, but not.

The Door in the Hedge is a collection of fairy tale retellings. There are 4 stories, and they are longer than short stories but shorter than novellas. I have liked other Robin McKinley books in the past, but this one did not impress me. I like fairy tales, and I think if you're going to re-tell one, you should have a good reason. These ones all introduced elements that weren't in the original, but I never could really figure out why. Perhaps the most auspicious start is the Twelve Dancing Princesses, which proposes that the man who solves the mystery of the princesses is an old soldier. So you may imagine that being an old soldier gives him skills that the young princes who have made the attempt before didn't have, growing up in ease and plenty. And that is hinted at, but really the reason he solves the riddle is that a magical old lady just happened to give him an invisibility cloak. And he still marries a princess he barely knows and somehow everyone lives happily ever after.
It may seem like I'm just hating on fairy tales, and I don't mean to. I appreciate the genre, and I think McKinley writes it well. But the reason I read this book is because I expected to read something original, and I didn't find that here.

It's Robin McKinley, so it is, of course, beautifully written (with a caveat I'll get to in a moment).

It's in the fairy-tale genre, so you need to be willing to accept that princes and princesses are (nearly) all wise, beautiful, good, brave, and kind. There is one commoner protagonist, but the rest are all royal, and noble in both senses of the word.

You also need to be able to accept that marrying people off to other people who they've never spent any time with is a reasonable thing to do, and that (in at least one case) the woman's consent is not particularly required for this. Leave your feminism, as well as your Marxism, if any, at the door. You could blame the source genre, but... eh. The author managed to give a female protagonist plenty of agency in The Blue Sword. I found the king offering his daughters up as prizes hard to forgive.

My other gripe is about the semicolons. An occasional semicolon is fine; it shows that two thoughts are linked together more tightly than two separate sentences would convey. But when the vast majority of your sentences include a semicolon (I am not exaggerating - far more sentences have one than lack one), and not a few of them contain two semicolons, at that point it's moved beyond a stylistic choice, and has gone all the way past an annoying tic to become an outright fault in the writing.

If none of those three issues bother you too much, these are beautifully told (or retold) stories by a highly capable author.

Basic Premise: Retellings of classic faerie tales. At least, 3 of them are. I think one of them may be original, but it is stylistically so similar to a "classic" tale that the arguing is simply semantic.

McKinley has long been one of my favorite authors (you should see how battered my copy of The Hero and the Crown is), and this volume simply reinforced that knowledge. I found myself so caught up in the tales that I didn't want to do anything but sit and read. It was a feeling I get only from certain authors. McKinley truly has a grasp of the magical. She didn't completely re-invent the tales (as she did with Spindle's End, Outlaws of Sherwood, and Beauty), but she added depth to the plots and characters that were missing from the originals. She somehow kept the simple beauty of the tales, though. It seems paradoxical, but it's true. If you get the chance to lay your hands on this book, snag it. The stories are fantastic for adults, but could even be read to older children (those who could sit through a chapter book). Not that the material is at all inappropriate, it's quite tame, just that the stories are longish and a smaller child would get antsy.