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Fairy Tale Week: Once upon a Time - Again and Again

Fairy tales, despite their problems, have such classic themes and universal appeal that they can be mined for countless unique interpretations. Andrew Lang's fairy tale books are good for classic versions. But if you want your fairy tales turned upside down and inside out for fresh perspectives, grab one of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's fairy tale anthologies: Snow White, Blood Red; Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears; Black Swan, White Raven; Silver Birch, Blood Moon; and Black Heart, White Bones. The best known and lesser famous tales are remade so that they seem like new. The retellings range from the twisted and strange, to violent ones, to bittersweet and lovely. There's a fairy tale here for everyone.



Gregory Maguire is the master of re-making classic stories told from an unlikely point of view. For a different take on Cinderella - read Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. For Snow White - Mirror, Mirror.



The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly, explores the fascination with fairy tales and uses many of the Brothers Grimm themes. In it, a young boy, angry at his stepmother, escapes to a dark fairy tale world where he endures a series of dangerous trials before he can go home.



For everything fairy tales, perhaps a shirt that says "Fairest of them all," go to SurLaLune Fairy Tales.

I acquired a fairy godmother of my own some weeks ago when Maria of A Passion for Books sent me a boxful of books, among them, CrazyBeautiful by Lauren Baratz-Logsted, a young adult retelling of Beauty and the Beast.

In an explosion of his own making, Lucius blew his arms off. Now he has hooks. He chose hooks because they were cheaper. He chose hooks because he wouldn’t outgrow them so quickly. He chose hooks so that everyone would know he was different, so he would scare even himself.

Then he meets Aurora. The hooks don’t scare her. They don’t keep her away. In fact, they don’t make any difference at all to her.

But to Lucius, they mean everything. They remind him of the beast he is inside. Perhaps Aurora is his Beauty, destined to set his soul free from its suffering.

Or maybe she’s just a girl who needs love just like he does.

What I love about this book:

- The hooks are inventive - a dangerous image of Lucius's beastly past.

- The dual point of view narrative of Lucius and Aurora. I've only read one other retelling which has the beast's point of view. I especially love Lucius's voice - dark and sardonic, with underlying sadness. Aurora's is much more innocent by comparison, sometimes funny in her naivete.

- That Lucius undergoes and emotional, not physical, transformation. All the anger that made him beastly is replaced by an earnest desire to be a better person. Lucius goes from wallowing in loathing for himself and the world to someone who wants to help others.

Aurora:

I just want to kiss him.

Is that so wrong?

I've never kissed any boy before, unless you count kissing Jessup during play rehearsals, which I don't.

When your mom is dying for five years, there's not really a whole lot of time left over for kissing boys.

But now I want erase those false first kisses with Jessup. A first kiss, I think, should be important, special. It should be with the person you want to kiss more than anybody in the world.

Lucius:

The strong wind whips a stray hair across the front of her face. I long to reach out with a hand, brush that hair out of the way for her, feel that hair, feel that cheek.

More than ever before right now, I wish that I had hands again.

What a glorious thing it would be to hold a girl's hand, this girl's hand, to feel her skin beneath my fingers.

Thanks again, Maria, for giving me this book!

What is your favorite fairy tale retelling?

Or in the alternative, ponder this: Are fairy tales dangerous? For women? Orphans? Gingerbread men?

Fairy Tale Week: Cinderella

I always hated Cinderella - so obedient, so passive, just waiting for the prince to place the slipper on her foot and rescue her from drudgery. But one non-book fairy tale adaptation that not only turns this fairy tale upside down, but knocks it out of the park in my opinion, is Ever After. In Drew Barrymore's Danielle de Barbarac, we have an admirable heroine; she is feisty, strong, and intelligent. She reads Thomas More's Utopia, rescues imprisoned servants, is passionate about class equality, and throws a fastball so hard, she can knock a grown man from his horse with it.

My favorite scene is towards the end when the Prince is charging up the castle with his sword drawn, so ready to rescue the imprisoned Danielle --- only to find that she has rescued herself, by her own wit and courage. This Cinderella doesn't need rescuing; she is superior to the Prince prostate at her feet. I love it!

In the wake of her father’s death, Ash is left at the mercy of her cruel stepmother. Consumed with grief, her only joy comes by the light of the dying hearth fire, re-reading the fairy tales her mother once told her. In her dreams, someday the fairies will steal her away, as they are said to do. When she meets the dark and dangerous fairy Sidhean, she believes that her wish may be granted.

The day that Ash meets Kaisa, the King’s Huntress, her heart begins to change. Instead of chasing fairies, Ash learns to hunt with Kaisa. Though their friendship is as delicate as a new bloom, it reawakens Ash’s capacity for love—and her desire to live. But Sidhean has already claimed Ash for his own, and she must make a choice between fairy tale dreams and true love.

Entrancing, empowering, and romantic, Ash is about the connection between life and love, and solitude and death, where transformation can come from even the deepest grief.

Ash by Malinda Lo is Cinderella with a twist. According to Malinda's website:

"In the first draft of Ash, the Cinderella character falls for the prince. It wasn’t until my good friend Lesly read it and said, 'You know, the prince guy is kinda boring,' that I realized that Cinderella was gay."

I would have to agree with her friend - the scenes with the fairy Sidhean lack vitality when compared with the ones between Ash and the Huntress. I loved that this book has a compelling and beautifully represented lesbian relationship, but the writing is what kept me reading late into the night: lush, lyrical, and enchanting - perfect for a fairy tale.

"Ash woke in the middle of the night from a dream of horses—tall, thundering white horses with foaming mouths and slender, wraithlike riders. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and went to the window that looked out over the Wood. She searched for the light of the candle by the grave but saw only darkness. Then there was movement at the edge of the trees, and she shivered. Where was her father?

"She ran down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door. The wind was rising. She ran down the hillside in her bare feet, feeling the earth alive beneath her toes, her nightgown flying behind her in white linen wings. She ran past the garden’s rows of carrots and cabbages and toward the dark, hulking line of the Wood. Beneath the hawthorn tree, the glass cover was tipped over on its side, the candle was snuffed out, and her father was gone. She knelt on the ground and reached for the candle, but she hadn’t brought matches and could not light it.

The wind gusted over her, whipping her hair around her face. The dark pressed against her, and she wondered if her father had given up his vigil because of the weight of the night on his back. She heard the hoofbeats then, coming closer and closer. She thought she saw a faint glimmer of white in the dark Wood, a glow of otherworldly light, like stardust caught behind glass. She was frightened, but she would not leave her mother. She lay down on the grave, pressing her body into the warm earth and her cheek against the gravestone. The hooves came closer, and she heard the high, thin sound of a bugle. The wind rushed toward her, and the cries of the riders were clear upon the air: They called for her mother, for Elinor. The ground beneath Ash’s body heaved, and she let out a scream of fright as she felt the world buckle beneath her, earth and stone and moss and root twisting up as if it were clawed by a mighty hand. There was a roaring sound in her ears as the horses surrounded her, and she squeezed her eyes shut, afraid of what she might see. She dug her fingers into the ground, clinging to the earth where her mother lay buried.

"And then there was a sudden silence, and in that silence she could hear the breathing of horses, the heaving of their lungs, the musical jingle of bit and bridle, and the whisper of voices like silvery bells. She thought she heard someone say, 'She is only a child. Let her go.'”

Fairy Tale Week: Beauty and the Beast II

Beauty and the Beast, the t.v. series, ran for three seasons, 1987-1990. Beautiful Catherine Chandler (Linda Hamilton of Terminator) is a corporate attorney at her father's Manhattan firm. Although she is rich and successful, Catherine feels empty. One night assailants mug her and slash her face. She is left for dead in an alley when Vincent finds her.

Vincent (Ron Perlman of Hell-Boy) is a beast with a heart of poet. Abandoned as a baby at the steps of St. Vincent, he was found and adopted by Father, a physician and leader of a small community of outcasts living in a secret underground city below New York streets.

Vincent takes the near-dead Catherine underground and nurses her back to health. Because her face is bandaged, she does not know what the man by her bedside looks like, who reads her Great Expectations to comfort her as she recovers. They form a tender friendship that is almost ruined when Catherine's bandages come off and she finally sees what Vincent looks like.

Catherine goes back to her old life and has plastic surgery so that she will look like she did before; however, her life is now irrevocably changed. She quits her father's firm and decides to work at the gritty D.A.'s office to fight crime. She has a purpose now, with Vincent's love and friendship to support her.

Father: I sometimes feel that I'm standing on the bank of a raging river watching you try to swim across. How can I not worry? I'd be a fool. And yet, Vincent, sometimes I have to marvel at your courage.

Vincent: Catherine swims across that river as well. She faces the same dangers, shows the same courage. And in many ways the toll on her is even greater.

Father: You really think that's so?

Vincent: On the other side of the river there is no one standing on the bank watching. On her side of the river there is no one praying for a safe passage. On her side of the river, Father, there is no one but Catherine.

Father: Then I shall stand watch, and pray, for both of you.

The show is mostly about Vincent and Catherine's impossible relationship: how Catherine maneuvers from her life above to her friends below, how they rise above their suffering. He cannot leave the underground because of his beastliness. And although Catherine loves him enough to turn her back on her world and come live with him, he won't let her make such a sacrifice.

There are episodes about some of the outcasts and how they turned their backs on the harsh world above, episodes where Catherine risks her life going after criminals and gets rescued by Vincent, episodes where Vincent and the outcasts are in danger and Catherine saves them.

Every aspect of the show was well thought out. Characters are skillfully drawn. The underground world is rich and imaginative, and New York City, despite the crime, has never looked lovelier, especially in scenes where Vincent perches on the edge of tall skyscrapers, contemplating the night-time cityscape below him. The writing has a literary quality. Many of the themes the show explored, through Catherine's job as assistant DA, showed social consciousness. Beauty and the Beast was exceptional - of course it only lasted a few seasons!

I have two problems (other than the liberal use of shoulder pads) with the show:

The first: the third season. If you had watched it, you know what I mean. If you haven't, don't watch it; it will break your heart. Just be content with the first two seasons.

The second: Vincent set an impossibly high standard which all other men, real or imaginary, invariably fail to match. That's what happens when a 13-year-old impressionable girl takes a fairy tale to heart. I had Vincent's poster up on my wall directly across from my bed and before going to sleep I would listen to a tape of Ron Perlman as Vincent reading poetry (Of Love and Hope, which includes works by Shelley, Byron, Frost, Rilke, ee cummings, and Shakespeare, as well as music compositions from the show - amazing!)

Noble, cultured, well-read, kind, and heroic, a refined man-beast who uses his great strength to help others -How could Vincent not be my first love?

Here is a video montage of Vincent and Catherine, with Ron Perlman as Vincent reading Shakespeare's Sonnet 29. Just listen to the rich timber and depth of his voice- who wouldn't fall for this man by his voice alone?



And because I couldn't resist - just an audio of Vincent reading Rilke.

… Continue

Micro Fiction Contest Voting Time!

Wow, was this great fun, but agonizing! Choices, choices, choices...

I want to thank everyone who entered; I know how hard it must be to put your work out there. I salute every one of you! If you didn't make it this time around, I encourage you to keep an eye out for the next contest. Finding new writers is a now a passion of mine and I will continue to hold writing contests in the new year (tip: January)

The finalists for this month's Micro Fiction Contest are (in no particular order):

Housetrap by Chad Redden

The Red Bicycle by Mikah

The Stairs by Icy Sedgwick

Please vote for who should win the $15 Amazon gift card in THIS POST only. However, please leave comments for the writers on their individual posts; I assure you, they would LOVE the feedback.

One vote per person.

You must be a Google follower of this blog for your vote to be eligible. Not a Google follower? It's easy to become one!

Voting ends December 28, 2009, 8:00 PST.

Good Luck!!!

The Red Bicycle by Mikah

He was running, always running. He couldn’t slow down, couldn’t stop. He distantly heard explosions, loud snapping sounds, but his breathing was roaring in his ears. How much longer could he run? Suddenly he heard one more loud snap and white pain shot through his head. He fell to the ground and was suddenly nine again following a string he’d found in a box. Around the Christmas tree, out the door into the drive and there it was! It was brand new, glistening in the sun and red as a fire truck. He slid his hands over it, feeling smooth cold metal against his skin. He could feel the grin spreading across his face and ran back to his family, waiting on the steps. He hugged them all, tears running down his cheeks; he hadn’t thought it would be possible to get anything other than home made gifts this year. “Go on, take it for a spin!” said his father as he hugged him.

He tried but felt something pulling him away. He was being shaken, he could see himself as a boy but he was getting further from his dearest memory. His eyes finally snapped open and he saw the white camouflage with red crosses that meant medics had arrived to save him. He smiled, but all he could think about was that red bicycle he had gotten the Christmas of 1930. It was Christmas in Germany, the year, 1944 and as he look back at where he’d fallen after the bullet grazed his head, the scarlet stain on the snow he thought of his family and the red bicycle then blackness took him.



My name is Mikah, I'm a teenage girl who loves to write and a favorite pastime of mine is reading. I didn't have that many people to talk to when I was growing up so I started writing and learning to play the guitar. I live in St. Louis, MO, and I'm really into this website, thanks to my uncle. My facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/profile.php?ref=profile&id=610433437