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inkandplasma 's review for:

break your glass slippers by Amanda Lovelace
4.0

Full review: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/03/04/break-your-glass-slippers-by-amanda-lovelace-(review)/

I discovered Amanda Lovelace completely by accident. My best friend and I were poking around a bookstore on my birthday trip to London and she turned around with two books, and we decided to pick them up. That was 'the princess saves herself in this one' and 'the witch doesn't burn in this one'. We marathon read them both, and totally loved them. It drove me into my love affair with contemporary poetry, and 'witch' is one of my favourite poetry books. It felt like every single poem made me feel seen. The second series, Things that Haunt, didn't connect with me as fully as the first, but that didn't put me off from immediately requesting and devouring 'break your glass slippers'. glass slippers is a poetic Cinderella retelling, where we're all a little bit Cinderella. I absolutely loved it.

This poetry collection is empowering and strongly feminist. It's a very personal thing to read poetry like this, as it's a kind of catharsis. There are some poems I didn't connect with, love poems, but that's to be expected. I haven't experienced the same things as Amanda Lovelace, so I won't see everything the same way. Still, there were some that I connected with very deeply and I loved the body-positive poetry as well as the messages of falling in love with yourself first. It felt like this was very original Lovelace again, where I felt like Things That Haunt was intent on mimicking her earlier success, the retelling aspect of this collection made the content feel fresh and new, and gave a whole new lens to look at the poetry from. I hope that the rest of this series is equally as beautiful and motivating, and I can't wait to see what other fairy tale retellings she tackles next.