S. M. Hallow’s debut novella, How to Survive This Fairytale (Hedone Books 2025), is a queer fairy tale retelling that follows Hansel (later Hans) on a journey that spans multiple classic stories, from Hansel and Gretel to Snow White (The Six Swans supplies the love interest, a prince-turned-swan named Cyrus). Blending the old and the new, Hallow imbues traditional stories with a modern mindset, and chooses a format to match: The novella consists of short, dynamic, flash-fiction style chapters intercut with video-game options for Hansel to choose from, and (anti-)self-help instructions for him (not) to follow. The book breathes life into a tired genre and sheds well-worn clothes to reveal something fresh, unique, and empowering. Its exploration of identity, love, disability, trauma, and storytelling itself is thought-provoking, engaging, and deeply moving, offering hope and therapeutic levels of affirmation and reassurance.

Although fairy tales exist to travel the world in endless permutations and were continuously re-told throughout their history (and prehistory, considering their importance in the oral tradition), the current publishing landscape has given them a new prominence. Marissa Meyer, a famous author in this space, described the market as overcrowded with fairy tale retellings as early as 2016; the trend has only grown since. These works combine commercial potential with their utility as a familiar framework for announcing social change, leading to a particular mix of idealism and pragmatism: Retellings give voice to minority groups and challenge repressive narratives, but also exploit the existing involvement of the audience, and benefit from recognizability rivaled only by billion-dollar brands.

Retellings, as a format, therefore face particular limitations: Both the audience’s attachment to the existing narrative arc and the sheer popularity and familiarity of these stories make it difficult to innovate. By 1857, the Brother Grimm’s fairy tales, which make up the bulk of this novella’s sources of inspiration, became the third most translated work after the Bible and Qur’an. [1] Now, 168 years later, after around six generations of writers have made their mark, one might struggle to make these stories feel fresh again, let alone use them to spark genuine intrigue and interest. How to Survive This Fairytale manages to do both, and emerges victorious, both as an individual story and as a contributor to the growing trend, which marks a significant transformation: After a long history of social and cultural repression, it will take more than a few decades for explicitly queer retellings to appear unremarkable and to lose their subversive edge.

In the spectrum between commercialism and activism, Hallow’s novella clearly sides with the second, using the trend to amplify a positive message and derail harmful traditions. Hallow cleverly transforms the pitfalls of the sub-genre into advantages, using them to weave key themes into the very fabric of the novella’s construction, turning it into a metanarrative, without losing any of the story’s immediacy and heart. Hansel, suspended in a net of interconnected fairy tales, struggles to break away from the “dominant” narrative, and fights to write his own story. Although an Evil Queen makes for a compelling antagonist, the real threat comes from within: his survival instinct mixed with imagined judgements of others, past trauma and social conditioning. The tide of how things “should” be propels him forward, while tradition and “fate,” embodied by the malicious narrator—who presents him with limited options and forces him to relive the worst moments of his life—continues to taunt him.

The choice to situate Hans within the most famous and well-known stories of all—with endings so familiar they might appear immutable—adds to the air of inevitability that surrounds him. Any changes he manages to enact hint both at the meaning of freedom and its limits. There is something intensely galvanizing about Hans taking on the challenge, an experience that is much helped by Hallow’s talent for characterization and representation of relatable emotions. Indeed, the novella reads primarily as a detailed character study of its main character. Hansel’s story progresses through intense renderings of life-defining events, each of which shapes him, adding depth with every paragraph. This exploration of his external and internal narrative—what happens to him, and also the tale he tells himself to explain who he is—examines the close connection between identity and history. The way Hans navigates the alternative versions of his story evokes key psychological concepts explaining how identities are formed and transformed.

Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius, the creators of the psychological theory of possible selves, argue that instead of planning for specific tasks and accomplishments, we visualize a version of ourselves that embodies the change we aspire to, then compare ourselves as we are to the way we could be. [2] This involves creating “false” paths based on real premises, with enough difference to warrant comparisons between the real and hypothetical outcomes. Hallow’s novella plays with these ideas, showing how the history of storytelling absorbed the very essence of humanity—common needs, fears, and dreams—to endlessly reproduce them in various shapes and sizes, but also imposing archetypes, both rigid and flexible.

In this way, narrative—a tool that forms the basis of both human culture and psychology, the building block of collective and individual identities—becomes a subject of the novella in itself. Hallow asks what stories are, what they do for us, and how they intertwine with the ways we navigate life, make decisions, ponder our regrets, and learn from our mistakes. This takes on a therapeutic dimension: By considering the limits of choice and freedom, the novella deconstructs the dream of what things “could” and “should” be, revealing the “perfect” version of a life as an illusion. Although we can never fully grasp what is “right” for us because our view is partial, and options limited, we can overcome our doubts, the what ifs, and disappointments; we can digest the loss and find happiness in the life we’re living instead of allowing the alternatives to consume us. There is something very moving and knowing about the way in which the narrative takes on disempowerment as a theme, continually asking whether we are actors or pawns, and considering the difficulties of either possibility. Flipping from grim determinism to an optimistic exploration of free will, with all its potential and downfalls, the novella settles in between the two, never losing sight of the characters’ agency and autonomy.

Hallow’s respect for the characters also manifests in the core difference between a traditional fairy tale and this retelling: the consideration of the psychological and emotional cost of all the tragedy and drama. Hansel works hard to overcome the trauma of losing Gretel and to become himself again after the Evil Queen transforms him into a mindless weapon; Cyrus, painfully aware of the sacrifices his sister made to help him become a prince again, is reluctant to admit that he misses being a swan, and has to weigh his wants and needs in the search for his true identity. Both destroyed and forged through their suffering, the characters yearn for comfort and consider the difference between fiction and reality: What makes a good story does not necessarily make a good life, but would they want to live a life so bereft of struggles that it is not worth rendering into a story?

There’s therefore a melancholy note that dominates the novella at first, the feeling that the worst has already happened and all that is left is to analyze and dissect that—a sense of resignation that comes with the tiredness brought about by constant calamity. Helplessness and hopelessness weave together with moments when change appears possible until, triumphantly and at last, the survival story transforms into a love story. While traditional fairy tales might replace the complex reasons for people to come together with the deus ex machina of destiny, Hans and Cyrus, despite sharing a magical bond, clearly choose one another. Their relationship is warm, tender, and cozy—a source of comfort, an antidote to the tribulations of the fantasy world. Even when leaning towards idealized, fairy-tale-like territory, it never loses its authenticity. Beautiful and heartwarming, their story builds towards a poetic full circle.

It is a rare feat for optimism to be informed, balanced, and feasible. In 2022, a new word was added to the Collins Dictionary which defines our moment in history: “permacrisis,” “an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.” From so-called recession pop to publishers asking for “uplift” in stories, the media often responds to an economic and social downturn by feeding the audience some much-needed joy. Escapism is a popular, yet not satisfying, answer to permacrisis, as is a focus on individual solutions, with the main character indulging in a victory while the world burns around them. For fiction to offer what Jonathan Lear calls “radical hope”—the form of optimism that emerges at times of deep cultural trauma and loss, and which involves a focus on a better future despite no rational basis for positivity [3]—it must demand strategic action in the face of uncertainty, intertwining survival with systemic change. This is the type of hope for which How to Survive This Fairytale advocates: not ephemeral and elusive, but rooted in resilience and subversion.

This novella is an impressive, thoughtful, lovingly designed story about the difficulties of breaking away from what is rigid and established—including our sense of self, our past, social expectations, and the baggage of history and tradition. It urges readers to claim their lives as their own, and shows why that fraction of freedom is worth all the effort. This happens at a larger and smaller scale: individually, for Hans, who manages to free himself after being trapped in the heartbreaking segment of the story where his choices are at their most limited; and on the collective scale, with the novella itself being a queer retelling that reshapes old stories, making the previously impossible enter the realm of possibility. As the evil narrator puts it, “to be caught in a story is to be caught in a wheel that has been propelling itself on thousands of years worth of momentum” (p. 105), and the novella is about how to break that wheel, on both personal and social levels. The idea that this can be done, against all odds and despite the wheel’s power, is so hopeful that it might break many readers’ hearts, and then mend them all over again.

Endnotes

[1] See Melanie Goldman’s “The Rise of Fairytale Retellings in Publishing” in Publishing Research Quarterly, 39 (2023), p. 220. [return]

[2] See Markus and Nurius’s “Possible Selves” in American Psychologist, 41(9) (1986), pp. 954–969. [return]

[3] See Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Harvard University Press, 2006. [return]