So as it happens, today is Tell a Fairy Tale day, so in honour of that today’s post is about fairytale retellings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of these are romances, but as i recommend a lot of romance already, I’m sure you won’t mind!
Let’s start with Geekerella, which is the first in Ashley Poston’s Once Upon a Con series, which is a YA romance series. As the name would suggest this is a Cinderella retelling, with a heroine who is a massive fan of a classic sci fi series, and a hero who is the star of a new movie adaptation. As ever with Cinderella stories, my main issues were around the meanness of the stepfamily, but I got past that – and it has a dachshund. And it should also be noted that my least favourite of the Bridgerton series is the Cinderella story – Benedict’s book, An Offer From a Gentleman, which is the third in the series but which I was delighted when the skipped it to go straight to Pen and Colin. I don’t think I’ve ever reread it, which says something but also maybe I should to see if I reassess it now.
Eloisa James has a whole series of fairy tale reworkings that she wrote after her Desperate Duchesses books. As well as Cinderella, she took on The Princess and the Pea, the Ugly Duckling, Rapunzel and my favourite of the series: Beauty and the Beast. In When Beauty Tamed the Beast, the hero has serious Dr House vibes. He’s cranky and does doctor stuff in deepest darkest rural Wales. She’s a society beauty who has accidentally managed to ruin her reputation and decided he is the answer. There is snark. There are independent characters. Just writing about it makes me want to read it again. Talking of Beauty and the Beast, the third Once Upon a Con is Bookish and the Beast and that’s also really fun. And for all of you who fell in love with the Beast in the Disney movie when Belle found his library: this is doing a riff on that. Also I maintain the beast in the Disney animated movie was hotter before he changed back into a prince.
I haven’t read this yet – but I do have it on the Kindle I think – but Sherry Thomas has a Mulan retelling. It’s called the Magnolia Sword and as you know I do love a a story with a girl dressed up as a boy (Masqueraders, Twelfth Night, etc etc) and it’s also a perfect excuse to post a clip of another of my favourite Disney heroes in one of my favourite musical numbers
Also on the list of books I own but haven’t read (yet) is T J Klune’s Pinocchio retelling In The Lives of Puppets. I will get there soon. And if you’ve read the book of the movie Wicked, the author of the novel that inspired the movie (but is very different and much darker) Gregory Maguire has also done some work in fairytales as well as in the wonderful land of Oz – including Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. And finally there’s an Amazon shorts series that’s inspired by fairy tales called The Faraway collection, which I have read a couple of mostly because the first one is by Rainbow Rowell.
And that’s your lot today – Happy Reading!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 