My Favorite Fairy Tale, a Blog Hop Party

Greetings, fairy tale explorers! Welcome to my portion of the fairy tale blog hop. I hope you have a good time exploring different authors this week, and I hope you find something new to delight you (better yet if it’s me!).

Thirteen fairy tale authors have gotten together to talk about their favorite fairy tales. Follow the links at the bottom of each blog post to hop to the next author’s website. Collect our favorite numbers to total up at the end and enter to win a print collection of our books! (There are several anthologies, debuts, and even an ARC for a BLINK YA book you can’t buy in stores yet!)

Favorite fairy tale? That used to be an easy question. “Beauty and the Beast,” of course. In college, as part of graduating with university honors, you had to write a thesis paper. I wrote mine on—you guessed it—“Beauty and the Beast.” Oh, I ate, drank, slept, and read that story for several months. So many different versions, with lots of contemporary ones. And the picture books! So many picture books. (Despite all this, I sadly left some ridiculous gaps, so please don’t ask me about Villeneuve’s version. I’m still embarrassed that I didn’t read that.)

Which was my favorite retelling? Definitely not the Disney film. I like elements of the Disney, but I can’t escape feeling like Belle is stuck up and just really not the Beauty that I wanted her to be.* My favorite version was easily Robin McKinley’s Beauty. And then, when I wrote my own (currently shelved) novel-length version, that was my favorite.  

I love “Beauty and the Beast” for its story of redemption, which was in fact what I wrote about. Here’s the TL;DR: The story is about more than falling in love with a beast. It’s about the power of seeing people truly and how that changes them—and us. There you go, about 64 pages summed up in a sentence (64, by the way, is 2^6; I love powers of 2, which is why 16 is my favorite small-ish number).**

But to make another long story short, years have since intervened, and the luster has faded from dear Beauty, the Beast, and all their incarnations. Asked today, I would be much harder pressed to answer, but I’m leaning toward “The Six Swans” (so much angst! so much sacrifice!) or “Diamonds and Toads” (my favorite theme—how gifts can be curses, and vice versa!). I even have a flash version of “Diamonds and Toads” here on the blog, if you want to check it out.

Which probably explains how I’ve ended up starting a novel based on a character from each of these tales. I love these characters so much, and if I can do even a little justice to who they are, you will too (someday).

So that’s it! Thanks for coming by. Now go visit Alicia Gale and find out what she has to say. If you’ve already been to all 13 stops and collected everyone’s favorite number, then go enter to win the grand prize.

As an added bonus, if you’d like to be included in an additional drawing (for an individual copy of Unspun), go to my Facebook page, follow me, and leave a comment letting me know what your favorite fairy tale is and why.

For an additional entry to my individual drawing (only available after Sunday, the 24th), go to Timeless Tales magazine and read some of the Snow White issue, which features my super-fluffy (and somewhat out of character for me) “The Nanny Job,” then come back to Facebook and tell me what you think of Snow White stories (doesn’t have to be mine).

And finally, if you just can’t wait and want to make sure you get a copy of Unspun, it’s on sale just this weekend. Go forth and purchase and enjoy!

Happy reading, all!

* On the other hand, in junior high I used to walk home from school while reading a book, and a boy I had a crush on called me “Belle” one time (just after we almost collided), and that felt like a compliment, so... mixed feelings?

** Which may also have something to do with why I’m a geek. (And yes, 16 is the number you’re looking for in the blog hop.)

Book Review: Blackthorn and Grim series, by Juliet Marillier

Note: This review is about book 1 (Dreamer’s Pool) and book 2 (Tower of Thorns), sort of combined. I haven’t read book 3 (Den of Wolves) yet, but I’m looking forward to it. While I think you could probably read book 2 on its own if you really wanted to, I don’t think it works well as a stand-alone.

TL;DR: Read the clean rating section. If that doesn’t stop you from wanting to read these books, read them. If you’ve read and liked Marillier before, read them. If you like complicated characters with horrific backstories who are nevertheless doing their best to live reasonably decent lives, read them. They’re great.

Rating: 4.5

Clean rating: PG-13 definitely. Largely for thematic elements (there’s some pretty majorly violent/awful backstory for both our main characters, including rape, torture, injustice, and various other horrible events). The backstory is neither glorified nor described in depth, but it’s pervasive in how these characters experience life. The books are not light, fluffy reads, though I also didn’t find them dark and depressing.

Book 1 also has some sexual content that I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I don’t like reading the sexual elements (though there was not a lot of detail, and it was all told in a very repressive tone by a character who clearly didn’t approve of his own behavior). On the other hand, whereas some sex scenes are just thrown in for fun, the couple of incidents in this book are absolutely integral to the storyline.

So while I can’t recommend the books to various of my friends and family who I know share similar values, I have loved them and will continue to read them.

Short summary: Blackthorn is a healer who is too angry to want to heal anyone anymore. When she’s given a chance to escape a terrible situation or die, she takes the deal that lets her escape, even with some conditions on her freedom that tend to ... chafe. Grim is big, strong, and loyal to Blackthorn. He’s got his own ugly past to deal with. Together they get drawn into complicated challenges to help people who may or may not deserve help.

Blackthorn and Grim’s characters and growth create the series arc, along with some mysteries from their pasts. The individual challenges create the individual book arcs.

What I liked: Oh, Marillier. It’s probably easier for me to just skip to what I didn’t like. But I’ll hit the highlights here.

Blackthorn. Grim. Although I think I like Grim a little better. He is not my usual kind of character; I tend to like witty, funny, clever—though not obnoxiously charming. But Grim is wonderful. He’s strong, determined, steady, kind, loyal. The revelations of his backstory throughout book 2 didn’t surprise me overmuch, but they gave such lovely depth to him as a person. I kind of want to hug him—except that would be super weird, because he’s also kind of this huge ogre sort of a fellow. It would be kind of like hugging a slightly friendly rock.

Blackthorn, for all her thorniness, is a lovely character too. Not the sort of person you want to sit and chat with (she would hate that anyway), but reliable and stronger than she thinks. I like how we see both of them slowing growing and changing and softening. Plus, without giving spoilers, I love what happens with the characters in the end of book 2. It made me happy and sad and yelling-at-the-characters-for-their-idiocy all at the same time.

As with the other Marillier I’ve read, the writing is exquisite. The storytelling is excellent. The twists worked—though I figured out what was likely to happen with large parts of the plot, there were plenty of surprises along the way. And the stuff that wasn’t surprising was still an enjoyable journey.

What didn’t work for me: Ummm... I’m thinking... Okay, I do admit I would have preferred some sort of workaround for the sexual content in Dreamer’s Pool (although I giggled just a little bit every time the character mentioned his “manhood”).

I was about to go on a bit about how I had no idea how to pronounce stuff. But then I saw that book 2 had a pronunciation guide that I just missed. Oops. I listened to the first one, so I got pronunciation of names like Flidais (Fliddiss) and Emer (eh-ver!) and Laois (leesh!) from that. But in Tower of Thorns, I spent the entire book wondering how I was supposed to pronounce Geilèis (ge-lace, apparently). So I guess I can’t complain about that now.

Last words: I recently had a friend do a critique for me on some stuff I’m working on, and she compared the writing to Marillier, and I kind of wanted to reach through the computer and hug my friend and then do a little happy dance. If my stories could one day be classed even remotely close to Juliet Marillier, I would feel like I had won at all the things.

Book Review: A Bit of Magic, a fairy tale collection

Overall rating: 3.5­­ stars

In case you missed it, fairy tales are my thing, so I was already sold on the idea of another fairy tale collection. Because I’m not really sure there can ever be too many. Most of these stories were based on fairly well-known tales, but there were a few lesser-known as well. On the whole I really enjoyed this collection. There were a few stories that didn’t speak to me, as is always the case in a collection, and there were a few that I really loved.

The highlights, for me:

“Reed Girl, Fire Girl, Cloud Girl,” by Lynden Wade. Nothing truly unexpected happens here, but I just kind of loved watching these characters travel together and discover love. It had me from the get-go. This one had a really strong traditional fairy tale feeling too, which I loved.

“Bluebeard’s Wives,” by Mae Baum. Kind of the grittiest story, but that’s to be expected from a story that involves Bluebeard, am I right?* I loved setting this tale in the modern world and with a different explanation of the Bluebeard mythos. But really, it was the ending that sold me—it was so deeply satisfying to me. I just kind of cheered internally. “Take that!” However, this isn’t a story that I think most of my family and friends would appreciate quite so much. There was just something about it that made me happy.

“The Thief and the Spy,” by Katelyn Barbee. For me, absolutely the highlight of the collection. The rich setting of the piece, the main characters and their personal quandaries and struggles, the magic woven into the story so seamlessly that it just feels like a part of their world rather than an additional afterthought. I also loved the variations from and similarities to the various versions of “Cinderella.” Like the slight change in the arrangement of Asha’s family (there’s only one evil stepsister; the other is on her side), the explanation for why Asha’s dresses keep getting prettier, why she sticks around, etc. Just a delightful romantic read with a lot of other stuff going on in it.

Clean rating: PG mostly, but some PG-13 stories, largely for fairy tale-ish violence or for thematic elements (you just can’t get away from Bluebeard, remember). “Bluebeard’s Wives” and “Goodbye, Gigi” had the most, as I recall.

I received an ARC from the publisher, but my opinions were not influenced in any way.

* Please note my utter inability to use slang, even in writing. Because I just couldn’t imagine myself typing “amirite?” without laughing at how I sounded so very not like me.