I was so intrigued by Leduc's assertion that this isn't actually a work of academic fairy tale scholarship, although I may just have a rather different view of what is and ought to constitute scholarship these days.
She does the thing that I love where she analyses something beloved in a way that sees both why it is valued and loved and still clearly notices the flaws. She's also very good at giving the attempts to subvert both the credit and critique they are due. For that, I'll even forgive

her defense of the final season of GoT.

The thing that sticks with me, beyond the way she interleaves her own story and tells it as a kind of post-fairy-tale fairy tale, is the way she makes my favorite argument, which is that it's rarely the explicit values of a text that shape how we think, but the implicit and the normal/ized that are most integral to how we think. There's this big and messy and complicated conversation that looms over books when it comes to the obligation of portrayal - both in terms of whether it lands on the individual or the collective and also in terms of what exactly we take from texts. This book feels like an important piece of that conversation, even if it does not do so by taking a stand.