The Wickeds by Gayle Forman

Information

Goodreads: The Cleaners
Series: Faraway Collection (Amazon Original)
Age Category: Adult
Source: Free with Prime trial
Published: December 15, 2020

Official Summary

The reviled villainesses of Snow White, Cinderella, and Rapunzel team up to set the record straight in a subversively funny short story by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of If I Stay.

Envious queen? Evil stepmother? Kidnapping hag? Elsinora, Gwendolyn, and Marguerite are through with warts-and-all tabloids, ugly lies, and the three ungrateful brats who pitted them against each other and the world. But maybe there’s more to the stories than even the Wickeds know. Is it time to finally get revenge? After all, they’re due for a happily-enough-ever-after. Even if they have to write it themselves.

Review

One of 5 Amazon-exclusive short fairy tale retellings from beloved authors, The Wickeds is the only one in the collection I really felt was worth reading. (You can read my review of The Cleaners by Ken Liu here.) To start, The Wickeds is a bit longer than some of the authors, giving a little more time for character development; it also has an interesting premise– trying to make readers wonder if the wicked stepmothers of classic fairy tales might have been misunderstood or even sabotaged (Who made the magic mirror say mean things anyway?). Did they really behave badly? If they did, perhaps their position was understandable?

Now, I don’t think the story succeeds 100% at making the evil characters sympathetic. Many of them did, in fact, actually do things that were pretty horrible! But it was fun following them on their journey to unravel exactly how things played out in the lives, what parts were under their control and what parts weren’t, and which people were actually cruel to them but got away with having a clean reputation.

As with The Cleaners, I’m also not convinced the story is distinctly YA. After all, it follows a bunch of characters who must be in their fifties, and one of the defining characters of YA is that the story has a teen protagonist; however, there’s a lot of crossover appeal here. I see no reason why a YA reader wouldn’t enjoy it.

So, this is fun. It doesn’t quite hit the mark with its message because things aren’t neatly separated into boxes of, “This person was nice and never did something cruel” and “This person was mean for no reason,” but it gives the reader a lot to think about, and the execution of the idea feels pretty original. I do hate that the book fell into the trap where an author seems to believe that a good short story has an ambiguous ending, though.