It’s Monday, and that means Fantasy with Friends! The prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, and this time we’re talking about fairytale retellings:
Do you like reading fairy tale retellings? What, in your opinion, makes a good retelling?
Broadly speaking, yes! I find retellings fascinating, because what the author chooses to keep the same and what they choose to change tells you a lot. Sometimes they’re pure nostalgia, basically little different from the Disney movie adaptations, and that’s an interesting choice too — sometimes it can be pretty fun and cosy, other times it just feels kinda repressive.
Obviously it’s not just an academic curiosity, though that’s there too: I enjoy fairytales in general because they have a familiar shape, so you know roughly what you’re expecting. If the author leans into that, it can be comforting; if they don’t, then you get the fun of trying to guess where it’s going exactly, where it’s going to echo the original and where it’s going to depart.
Some of the earliest fairytale retellings I read were by Robin McKinley, and that’s especially fun because she actually retold “Beauty and the Beast” at least twice — once in Beauty, and then differently (and with more complexity) in Rose Daughter. You can argue for an influence of “Beauty and the Beast” in some of her other stories too (Sunshine and Chalice spring to mind). It’s obvious that something in the story really resonates with her and sticks in her head.
More recently, there’s T. Kingfisher. I really liked Hemlock & Silver, which a “Snow White” story… kinda. She takes a different POV, adds new characters, and gets wildly inventive about the worldbuilding, using “Snow White” as the barest beginning for a total flight of fantasy. It almost doesn’t feel like a retelling at all, but sometimes you get these sly little references to remind you where it jumped off from…
I also like books which aren’t quite retellings, but which riff on fairytale worlds and tropes, like Amy Coombe’s Stay for a Spell in which the protagonist’s parents send all the princes of the realm to kiss the cursed princess, imagining that will break her curse.
I think sometimes fairytale retellings and stories using fairytale tropes can be lazy, like pretty much any other book, story or subgenre — and sometimes even the lazy ones can be fun in a cosy sort of way. It’s kinda like the same reason I enjoy classic crime stories: there’s ultimately a kind of predictability to them: you know what you’re getting.
At the same time, fairytale retellings can be transformative in any number of ways, creating queer-positive worlds, playing with gender roles, etc… It all depends on what you do with them.
So what do I think makes a good fairytale retelling? I think my favourites all try to delve deeper into the story, whether it’s by adding psychological realism, adding new points of view, queering it up or developing a whole new world to transform the story. There’s so much that can be done, and I enjoy watching people be inventive about it.
