Admittedly Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella aren’t the most pro-active role models for girls. Considering it a “small misfortune” that she was raised on such tales, Toronto author Anne Laurel Carter focuses, in her new short story collection, on the kinds of “real princesses” she wished she’d been raised on. In an author’s note, she describes them as “independent young women, who, throughout the ages, took leadership, defied social conformity, and were smart enough to banish evil from their home.” That, for better and for worse, defines and drives Carter’s characters in stories that range from legends to contemporary tales.

Ironically, the most trenchant and inspiring stories are not the ones featuring assertive patriarchy-defying über-heroines, but the ones portraying everyday teen girls who are a mixture of vulnerability and strength. The fairytale “The Legend of Princess Sheila NaGeira” and the historical story “Badlands” are each a case in point. Both stories are confined by their thematic agendas, turning the main characters into too-perfect heroines, rhetoric-spouting exemplars lacking in emotional substance. Though there are moving moments in Carter’s portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship in “Badlands,” the story is unsubtle and didactic, like the Princess Sheila tale, with none of the psychological and symbolic undercurrents of the best fairytales.

Those stories are, however, in the minority. The memorable majority feature powerfully conflicted girls, seething with emotions that they’re struggling to understand: Pauline in the Vicky Metcalf Short Story Award-winning “Leaving the Iron Lung”; Lynn in “Sleeping Beauty”; and Ruthie in “No Missing Parts.” It is in these compelling dramas, with their characters of depth, shadows, and edge – rather than in the ideologically driven stories – that readers will find achingly real heroines to identify with and learn from.