Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, featuring a different top 10 theme each week. This week’s topic is about fairy tale retellings — either ones we’ve read or ones we want to read. I’m doing a bit of both.
I’ll start with the fairy tale retellings that I’ve read and loved:
1) Deerskin by Robin McKinley: An incredibly moving and disturbing, yet oddly beautiful, retelling of the somewhat obscure fairy tale Donkeyskin.
2) Robin McKinley writes such amazing reimaginings of fairy tales, that I’m going to include another three as one item: Beauty, Rose Daughter (both retellings of Beauty and the Beast), and Spindle’s End (a retelling of Sleeping Beauty).
3) Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale: I’ll admit to being confused by the tower for a while and assuming this was a retelling of Rapunzel, which it is not. According to the author’s website, it’s a retelling of a lesser known Grimm tale called Maid Maleen. But in any case, no matter which tale it’s based on, I really enjoyed it!
4) The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine: I think the concept of this book is just so clever — The Twelve Dancing Princesses retold as a tale of harshly confined sisters in Jazz Age New York. (review)
5) Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce: I really liked this retelling of Red Riding Hood (who seems here to be mixed with heaping spoonfuls of Buffy).
6) The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer: I have a sneaking suspicion that these books will be everywhere for this week’s TTT topic! I’ve absolutely loved the books in this series so far, and can’t wait for the final one to be released this fall. (And then the series will be over… sob.) (review)
7) My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me edited by Kate Bernheimer: This collection of rewritten fairy tales includes some really weird and wonderful new versions of classic tales. You can read the collection straight through or pick it up and read stories at random. Either way, very entertaining. Plus, you just can’t beat the title.
8) Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm by Philip Pullman: Another collection of rewritten tales, in this case classic Grimm stories rewritten by the masterful Philip Pullman. Includes both tried-and-true favorites and well as more bizarre or obscure tales — quite fun to read. (review)
9) Fables by Bill Willingham: The Fables series is simply one of my very favorite things ever. Take just about every fairy tale character you can think of, put them into modern day New York, create incredibly complex world-building, and write 150 comic books in the series. The series is available as a series of paperback volumes, and the final volume, #22, was just released last week. I can’t quite bring myself to read it — I just don’t want it to be over! (tribute)
10) Finally, two from my shelves which I haven’t read yet, although I’d like to:
- Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth, a retelling of Rapunzel
- Bound by Donna Jo Napoli, a retelling of Cinderella
Fairy tale retellings are such fun to read. Which ones do you love?
Share your link, and I’ll come check out your top 10!
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