Your favorite childhood fairy tales are re-invented in Mean Girls Poetry: A Wicked Collection of Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales. Author Heather Cuthbertson delivers funny, sometimes demented, verses with a female focus that reveals a little about the evolution of a woman’s place in modern society. 

There are several familiar tales included in this slim volume. Many can be identified by their titles, such as “The Mystery Behind Humpty Dumpty’s Fall” and “Little Red Riding Hood Kicks Some Tail.” Others require the reader to slip deeper between the lines of rhyming words before a memory from childhood surfaces. Under Cuthbertson’s pen, Rapunzel becomes Naughty Nicole in “Tower Break.”  Nicole escapes from her skyscraper prison with a little flirtation and lipstick. In “Piggy Pot Luck,” a take-off of The Three Little Pigs, a mistreated she-wolf develops anger management problems that lead her to exact a viscous revenge. And traces of the original Sleeping Beauty are found in “Sleeping Beauty’s Stipulations” with the addition of a guardian fairy who insults a prospective suitor. 

Cuthbertson displays a talent for reconfiguring the old tales using adult themes that express greed, anger and envy: “Bella knew she’d need a plan/If she was to have a shot/It contained just one thing/Make her sisters not-so-hot.” The heroines in this book are not helpless little women who are quietly waiting for their princes to come and sweep them off their feet. No, these girls get mean in a humorous way. The book leans toward an older young adult audience with a strong message of brashness and bit of violence sprinkled on top. 

Mean Girls Poetry is an entertaining collection of historical rhymes combined with modern wit that by-passes political correctness and plunges full-force into brazen girl power. 

Melissa Levine
For Independent Professional Book Reviewers
www.bookreviewers.org
July 28, 2007