Fairytale updates—like fanfiction—start with a built-in comfort level; you already know the characters and storyline. Is it easier for the author to build from archetypes or do they have to work harder to bring anything new to the table? In Cinder, and now Scarlet, Marissa Meyer tackles some of our most prevalent folklore with grace and invention. She brought freshness, warmth, moon colonies and androids to the Cinderella story, without losing any of the essential charm, timelessness or integrity. So I jumped into Scarlet, the sequel, with both eagerness and trepidation; it didn’t start with the same characters or setting—in fact it was half way across the world from New Beijing—and I cared a little less about Red Riding Hood. The sequel hopped between Scarlet and Cinder’s stories almost every chapter and while the new point of view was a little slower to ramp up, the chapters that continued the Cinderella story more than made up for it.

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The first chapter of Spindle’s End (2000) is one of the most beautiful pieces of prose ever written. The first time I read it I wanted to hug it close and wrap it around me and live in it forever. I wanted to read it aloud to people. I didn’t much want to go on and read the second chapter. The problem with wonderful lush poetic prose is that it doesn’t always march well with telling a story. The requirements of writing like that and the requirements of having a plot don’t always mesh. Spindle’s End is almost too beautiful to read. It’s like an embroidered cushion that you want to hang on the wall rather than put on a chair. Look, it goes like this:

The magic in that land was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster dust. (Housecleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If you lived in that country you had to descale your kettle of its encrustation of magic at least once a week, because if you didn’t you might find yourself pouring hissing snakes or pond slime into your teapot instead of water. (It didn’t have to be anything scary or unpleasant like snakes or slime—magic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in which it found itself—but if you want a cup of tea a cup of lavender and gold pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory.)

I read it when it came out, and I kept thinking about re-reading it, completing my read of it, to talk about here. Sometimes I got as far as picking it off the shelf, but I never actually read it again until now, because when I thought about actually reading those gorgeous sentences I felt tired and as if I wasn’t ready to make that much effort again yet.

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Edward Eager’s first success, a play called Pudding Full of Plums, came while he was still attending Harvard University. Inspired, he quit school and headed to New York and Broadway, enjoying a mildly successful career as a playwright, lyricist and screenwriter. As a decided sideline, he turned to children’s books after the birth of his son Fritz in 1942, and his realization that other than the Oz books (yay!) and the Nesbit books (yay yay!) he simply did not have enough worlds of wonder to share with his son, and this was something he could decidedly change. This turned out to be an even more inspired choice: although Eager’s plays and screenwriting are largely forgotten today (and, as I found, incorrectly listed in Wikipedia), most of his children’s books remain in print, and have inspired in their turn certain comments on this blog eagerly begging for an Eager reread.

Look. After awhile, the puns in these children’s books are going to get to you. Anyway, here we go, with the first of the Eager books still in print: Half Magic.

[When wishing gets decidedly complicated by mathematics and unimpressed recipients]

On our first sight of the sea-witch Misskaella, who haunts the shore of Rollrock Island, she’s “sat exactly halfway between tideline and water, as if she meant to catch the lot of us.”

So fantasise the fearful children, at least, to whom the haggard old crone at the broken heart of this bitterly beautiful book represents “the face of our night-horrors, white and creased and greedy.” That would be the exact reaction Misskaella, in her more maudlin moments, means to elicit, but her position, perched on a boulder on this borderline—with a foot on the land and a fin in the froth—signifies something else. It speaks of a love lost, and a life divided: two of the core concerns of Margo Lanagan’s hypnotic new novel, The Brides of Rollrock Island.

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It’s Week 2 of the Battle of the Network Fairy Tale Shows, where the real winner is genre television! Once Upon a Time hones in on the motivations of its most sinister character, while Grimm introduces us to a new breed of creature as it teaches us a valuable lesson about not eating other people’s food or sleeping in their beds.

So, how did Once Upon a Time and Grimm’s sophomore efforts fare this week? Clicken-zee! And beware the spoilers.

[Mirror, mirror, on the wall...]

In writing on fairy tales, there’s often a functionalist bent to the analysis. This means that tend we view fairy tales as fulfilling societal need: they contribute to the stability of a group or culture. In this way, characters and predicaments become allegories: practice for situations we may face ourselves in real life, or a form of ‘safe’ role play. Red Riding Hood is not about hiking in the forest; it’s a warning about wolves, about prostitution, a tale of sexual awakening, and so on, and so on.

I like this kind of analysis. It’s important because it dives under the smooth-looking surface of fairy tales, and stirs up a surprising turbidity. It makes us question unspoken assumptions (why is the youngest child always the special one?), and highlights the significance of story-telling in learning.  However, I don’t think it’s always perfect. By our very framing of fairy tales in this way–somewhat didactic way, orientated around adherence and cohesion—I think we sometimes lend them a static quality that they don’t always deserve.

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A mysterious girl in the royal extended family, some say a demon because of disturbing markings around her eyes, is banished from the palace. A very young prince discovers her living in the gardens on the kindness of servants.

Like all princes, even ones that don’t reach the waist of their eldest sister, he wants to save her. But the only way to remove the demon’s markings from her eyes is for her to tell, bit by bit, the stories written upon them.

Thus begins The Orphan’s Tales, a well-woven tapestry of fairytales-within-fairytales in the world of Ajanabh, both like and unlike its inspiration, The Arabian Nights.

The stunning Orphan’s Tales, by Catherynne M. Valente, is a two book work (in the way that Lord of the Rings is a three volume book), comprised of In the Night Garden and In the Cities of Coin and Spice (both Spectra Books). Her writing is a study in classicism—the rich retooling of stories either centering around or inspired by a wide variety of classics, from Asian folklore like Japan’s The Grass-Cutting Sword to fairy tales from England to Germany, from Norway to Russia, from the Middle East to Africa. The versatility of Valente’s knowledge shines bright as stars.

[And needing to know what happens next will drive you mad... in a good way.]

In Terribly Twisted Tales, editors Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg put their skills to work collecting widely varied permutations of famous fairy tales by The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Ang Lee, and ancient Aesop.

The anthology opens with a piece by Dennis L. McKiernan, a writer who has oft turned his pen to altering fairy tales, as his Faery series of five novels makes clear. “Waifs” is a retelling of “Hansel and Gretel” from the perspective of the witch who owns the gingerbread house. This alone would be twisted enough, but the children are also twisted in their own way. This was a great opener of a story, and probably the most twisted of the lot.

Annie Jones follows up McKiernan with a new look at “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” with “My Great-Great-Great Grandma Golda Lockes.” Setting the story in a real time and place, as written by a diarist, Jones posits a much more criminal origin for the story  of the sleepy golden-haired girl. This tale makes the protagonist less than the hero we are familiar with, and envisions a much more real, practical, and earthy story. Not to worry though, there are still talking, porridge-eating bears.

[More strange tales below the fold....]

People sometimes ask me if there’s anything I wish I’d written. Of course, there are whole libraries of books I wish I’d written, from The Iliad onwards, but the only book I’ve ever felt that I would have written exactly the way it is is Robin McKinley’s Deerskin. Yes, it’s a dark and disturbing fairytale retelling about rape and recovery, and I wouldn’t change a word of it. It’s not an easy book. But it is an important one.

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