break your glass slippers by Amanda Lovelace (Review)

you can have the lipstick.
you can have the sword.

break your glass slippers is the first entry in Amanda Lovelace’s newest series, You Are Your Own Fairy Tale. It’s out on April 16th in the UK, and I’ll definitely be picking this one up for our poetry collection, in pride of place next to the Women are Some Kind of Magic paperbacks.

Rating: 4 stars!

Thanks to Andrews McMeel Publishing and Netgalley for the eARC. This has not affected my honest review.

What did I think?

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.