Insubstantial at best, insufferable at worst, boring most of all. NPR's recommendation brought me here. Why do I keep listening to them? The "fairytales subversively retold" schtick is such well-covered ground that if you're going to retread it, you have to do something extremely original, especially considering the recent plethora of garbage fairytale material being spewn out by Disney lately. And you know what, at least I can respect the almost sinister triviality of shows like Once Upon A Time or the live-action remakes of old animated favorites. At least their naked corporate greed is just that, naked; transparently brainless. A Wild Swan is brainlessness posturing infuriatingly as art. 
 Also, there are some men who are good at writing women and women's POVs; Cunningham is not one of them. Every insipid sentence of this book screams middle-aged male - its hatred of millennials, its disillusionment with marriage, its lazy characterization of male/female relationships and complete one-dimensional understanding of women. The most horrid of the latter is the retelling of Beauty and the Beast in which (view spoiler)[Belle spends the story wistfully wishing to be raped because she is sick of the meek non-feral boys in her town, and in the end, gets her wish! (hide spoiler)] It's like a porny, unclever, misognystic R.L. Stine twist. 
 Read instead: David Sedaris' Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, which manages to capture the folksy, sentimental nature of fairytales and insidiously twist them, but with all new stories (no more retellings of Rapunzel or Jack and the Beanstalk, please, PLEASE) or Jonathan Goldstein's Ladies and Gentleman, The Bible! which humorously retells famous bible stories.