I’m a fan of Benjamin Lacombe’s style and own several books illustrated by him, so I’m accustomed to the high-quality artwork he brings to everything he illustrates, but I can’t hide my dismay at seeing how he nor Roumiguière handled “Beauty and the Beast” for this picture book retelling, whose artistic beauty doesn’t overwrite its problematic contents.
The first red flag is in the author’s notes, in which Lacombe says airily that he doesn’t like neither the Madame de Villeneuve original fairy tale nor the shortened Madame de Beaumont version, both of which he calls outmoded and moralistic.
And the second red flag came from scriptwriter Cécile Roumiguière, who stated on her page that she knew the fairy tale not from the original or the shortened version but from the Jean Cocteau film from 1946, and that Lacombe (who in his own words hated the original fairy tale) is a huge Disney fan that adores their animated motion picture.
Which such alarming unfamiliarity with and contempt for the source material, I pose a very valid question about why exactly these two were hired to create a “Beauty and the Beast” retelling?
The end product speaks for itself: such ignorance about and contempt for the source material have produced a profoundly offensive portrayal of Beast that is pure and unfiltered ableism.
So disgustingly ableist and even eugenicist a take on the nature of Beast that I would like to think the authors didn’t mean to do it on purpose, because the alternative doesn’t place them in a good light personally or professionally. Considering that Lacombe says in the author’s notes that he got convinced to illustrate a Beauty & Beast retelling that he never wanted to do before after visiting a Loire palace in which the portrait of Antonietta González is displayed, I embrace Hanlon’s Razor and assume no ill-intentions, even though that doesn’t erase the issue of ableism.
My regular readers know well my fascination for Petrus Gonsalvus/Pedro González, the 16th century Spaniard with hypertrichosis (excessive body hair that covers all the body like animal fur) who was gifted to King Henri II of France for his amusement, and who got married off to a beautiful woman named Catherine with whom he had several children, some of which inherited his hypertrichosis. This is the purported real case that is speculated to have inspired Madame de Villeneuve to write the fairy tale (which makes it all the odder that Lacombe dislikes it), and Antonietta is one of the couple’s hairy children.
According to Lacombe, Antonietta’s portrait made him want a different Beauty & Beast story that was based on the true story of the Gonsalvus family, particularly their youngest child that had been gifted as a circus “animal” to powerful Italian nobles. He endeavoured to do art for a story based on her to do her suffering justice—he claims grandly—not merely another picture book regurgitating Villeneuve or Beaumont.
And he ended up creating a collage built over the Beaumont version (without knowing it, I’m sure) with a heavy aesthetic loan from Disney (which has a troubling interpretation of the curse), and crowned with undeniable ableism that’s going to be a stain on his reputation and Roumiguière’s.
“Marquise, surely you exaggerate and it can’t be that terrible,” you’ll exclaim. “What could be so bad as to make you call a respectable artist and his scriptwriter ableist and borderline eugenicist?”
Welcome to Conversations with Fairy Whisperers, Emily! We’re glad to have you as today’s guest in out space to connect the fairy tale retellings readership with the authors of the stories they love. I hear you’ve just published your first novel, congratulations! Tell us about yourself, what was your journey towards becoming an author like?
Thank you so much for having me! Wine for Roses is my first book, a queer retelling of Beauty and the Beast set in modern-day Indiana. I wrote the first draft of this story during lockdown with a newborn. I’ve been primarily a writer of short stories for the last ten years, mostly Science Fiction and Fantasy, which have been published in various magazines. I originally thought this would be a short story as well, but it just kept growing.
Your mentioned that your first publications were short stories, do you prefer to write in short form or long form more?
I naturally gravitate towards the short form. Even Wine for Roses is technically a novella. The structure of the short story has always felt easier to hold in my head, more natural to my process. I’m a discovery writer, and writing a short story can feel like biking along a familiar path through the woods. It’s going to look different every day, and I’m going to encounter different creatures, but I know the road. I also tend to underwrite and then go back and flesh scenes out, which is also naturally more conducive to the short form.
Do you have a favourite fairy tale? What aspects of it appeal to you personally, and why?
Beauty and the Beast is my favorite fairytale. I imprinted on it as a child and never let go. And of course, it lends itself so well to queer interpretations, with its questions about what romance is and who gets to experience it.
In your opinion, what makes a retelling stand out? What do you consider the joys and challenges of writing in this specific subgenre?
When I think of the best retellings, I immediately go to Angela Carter. She doesn’t hold back in her work, or shy away from the darker themes we see in a lot of fairy tales. The challenge of course, is in making your story unique.
In your opinion, what fairy tale is the most complicated to reinvent, and why?
There’s dark motifs in all fairy tales, but Beauty and the Beast is particularly difficult because it naturally brings up themes like consent and abusive relationships. I think a lot of this is informed by the Disney version of the movie, in which the Beast character has anger issues, but every retelling is a fable about falling in love across this huge power differential. The most effective versions swap the power dynamics at the end. A great example is Jane Eyre, which is a Blackbeard/Beauty and the Beast retelling. By the end of the story, Jane has all the money, all the power, and all the knowledge, forcing Rochester to simply wait on her decisions. It’s a complete flip-flop from how they meet. I’ll leave it up to readers to decide if my retelling pulls that off!
From your recently published Wine for Roses, a contemporary fantasy story inspired by our favourite “Beauty and the Beast,” I was most impressed by the focus on rose gardening, something that’s not common in retellings of this tale even though the rose symbolism is so important. How did you come across the idea for your take on the fairy tale, and what can you tell us about its creative process?
I began growing roses shortly after I wrote the first drafts of this story. I began growing roses myself, and the more I learned about roses, the more material I had for the book! The rose rosette disease, which plays such a large role in the story, is unfortunately something I’ve dealt with myself (and it’s as creepy as it sounds). My garden and my novel very much grew up together.
I like that description! You’re the first reteller with such an extensive knowledge of roses I’ve found in my years of reading, and I liked how you managed to make the Beast figure in your story be like a “human rose.” What do roses symbolise for you in the story or in general, and do you have a favourite varietal?
I think roses symbolize caretaking in a broad sense, simply because they’re so much work. They’re not hard to keep alive–life wants to survive–but helping them stay healthy and bloom their best is quite labor intensive. My favorite varietal is David Austin’s Roald Dahl, which is a peach rose named for the author of James and the Giant Peach. I love an unusually colored rose, and you don’t see too many peach ones.
Many authors who started their careers writing retellings later abandon fairy tale retellings for other genres. Do you plan to continue writing retellings or will you move on to different ideas for your next book?
The book I’m working on now is a sort of near-future space opera, so it’s not fairytale-coded in the same way. But I can’t seem to stop retelling this story! A lot of my short stories are also Beauty and the Beast retellings at some level, and I think I’ll always revisit that.
Do you ever yourself writing an original fairy tale as opposed to a retelling of one?
I truly believe that all storytelling is in conversation with the stories that have come before. In some sense, if the storytelling is not based in tradition, then it’s no longer a fairytale. But on the other hand, all retellings are unique stories, in that only the author could have told that exact story exactly like that. I think my writing (at least within the fairytale genre) falls closer to the “in conversation” end of the spectrum.
If there was a Hall of Fame for retold fairy tales, which would you consider the best retold stories books and why are they worthy of inclusion in said Hall of Fame?
I’ve already mentioned Angela Carter and Charlotte Brontë, and of course Robin McKinley is the GOAT. Tanith Lee is great if you like a little subversion.
Is there an author who you view as a role model for your own writing?
I love Emily Tesh’s work. She also began writing in the fairytale-esque genre (if you’d like a unique fairytale, definitely check out SILVER IN THE WOOD!) But she’s branched out quite a bit, and I like how she writes across genres. I’d like to have that sort of breadth.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, Emily! We will be keeping an eye on your future books, which we hope shall be many more in the years to come.
This retelling reads like a spooky version of “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” with a dash of Nordic draugar folklore as twisted by someone who loves Horror stories.
And, surprisingly, I liked it even though I dislike Horror.
For me, this second book in the Hearts of Ezo series was better than Saints and Monsters. Better written, better planned in terms of plot, with less confusion about the world and its lore, and above all with a cast of main characters that was more appealing than the first.
Oh, and there’s no love triangle!
I wouldn’t be surprised if this one improvement in the second book over the more flawed first book will push other readers to like this story best, too. Lots of us really loathe love triangles in any kind, shape, and form.
An angry and malodorous chud who doubles as the town’s blacksmith and unofficial Faerie headhunter, and a fastidious dandy who doubles as the town’s resident Vogue on two high-heeled legs and is secretly attempting this faux-Victorian world’s equivalent to suicide by cop?
Who even thought that such a plot was a good idea for a Beauty and the Beast retelling?
And I’m rating the chud and the dandy this highly?
This might sound strange, but I think that this book’s greatest weakness is also its greatest strength.
This retelling has the funniest Rumpelstiltskin I’ve come across so far.
And the most irritating.
Ah, but the princess more than makes up for this clumsy and out-of-touch Fae lord who annoyed me more times than he made me laugh. Because Gisele is unique amongst princesses: she isn’t young but in her forties, she isn’t particularly beautiful, she has no striking attributes of any kind, she has no magic, she will inherit nothing, no one seeks her hand in marriage, and to top it all off, she is cursed.
And it’s all the fault of Rumpelstiltskin, who in this world has no name because he lost it through distraction and failure to plan well and foresee the consequences of his deal with Queen Bianka, Gisele’s mother, who promised him her firstborn in exchange for spinning straw into gold but failed the test of guessing the Fae’s name, and that is why Gisele is now a debt to be collected.
I’d like to start this début review for my A Tale Transformed project dedicated to reviewing fairy tale retellings with some general remarks on the author’s writing:
a. Beka Gremikova has a nice mix of cruelty and warm ‘n’ fuzzies in this anthology, and knows how to strike a balance between both. When she wants to do silly, she does it hilariously silly (so long as you like her brand of humour), and when she wants to be Very Bad to Characters, she makes everyone suffer.
b. Beka can do Mainstream Retelling and Peripheral Retelling both. A rare ability, in my reading experience, as most authors that tackle retellings of fairy tales and myths tend to master only one of them and either be passable or not good at the other.
c. She wrote some of these stories in a way that doesn’t quite fit the mould of traditional retellings. There should definitely be a new and officially-named subgenre to describe this kind of stories that aren’t retellings but feel so fairy tale-ish as if they were. If there’s not one already, I’m going to name this subgenre as Folkloric Fantasy and refer to it as such from now on, credit to this author for calling it so to me, regardless of who came up with the name first as I am not in the know yet.
Once upon a time, in a vegetation-overrun cottage by the river in The Shire, there lived a little girl who didn’t read fairy tales.
But she knew them all.
Once upon a time, there was a mother who never bought her children a children’s book, let alone a fairy tale.
But she told them all.
Once upon a time, there was a little boy with a big imagination who wrote stories for his friends in exchange for pennies, even though they weren’t fairy tales.
But he grew up to write a great book series full of them.
Once upon a time, there was a kind young woman bright and cheery as the sunlight bathing her paradisiac island, who didn’t believe in songs and fairy tales.
But she put on her armour to defend a despised fictional girl who believed in them.
First of all, thank you for your interest in the backstory of this new project, which was not meant to be the journey of self-discovery that it became over the years. The genesis of the idea I am presenting here took place five years ago when, once Game of Thrones ended and we found ourselves without hopes for a sixth ASOIAF book to keep Pawn to Player active with consistent analytical pieces, it occurred to me to create a project dedicated to fairy tale retellings that would host an exclusive award for them. In the long preparation phase for it, I learnt a lot that I didn’t expect to, in addition to clarifying things that I had only vaguely intuited. Now I am going to share with you what this new project is about, after several lovely people that became aware of my plans helped me greatly with polishing them, and to whom I am very grateful, especially to Mariella Taylor and this site’s founder, Brashcandie, without whom this would have never become a reality.
My story with fairy tale retellings has been a series of events that coincided one after another in a successive chain, easy to trace. Unlike what is normal for many children, I didn’t have children’s books growing up; my voracious appetite for reading was satisfied with “tales for grown-ups,” as author Chufo Llórens calls adult literature. I wasn’t familiar with fairy tale books and films as a child, not even Disney’s (which I didn’t watch until my late teens), but I knew them by heart through oral transmission and had some favourites.
My mum was responsible for that. Many times, at bedtime or when I was sick in bed, she would come and tell me fairy stories to entertain me. She was born in difficult circumstances and she had to fend for herself alone in her youth, so she never had fairy tales or children’s stories to read either. But she had an innate curiosity, an alert mind, and a natural talent for storytelling and doing voices and character impersonations. She learnt many children’s stories and fairy tales by ear and told them all to me and my siblings. I still remember that my favourite of all the stories she told me was Little Red Riding Hood, mostly because of her hilarious impersonation of the Big Bad Wolf with a deep, frightening voice that scared and delighted little me. To this day, yelling “To better eat you with!” imitating Mum’s wolfish voice is an inside joke in my family.
You could say that I became familiar with fairy tales and their retellings without even trying. When I was older, I won a nice edition of Puss-in-Boots in a children’s contest as part of my rewards for participation, which was my first traditional fairy tale book, and my much-older siblings left me as inheritance of sorts a double edition of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan without a cover, a cracked spine, and loose pages with broken edges. I didn’t have more tales than these three.
But the seed had already been sown, and I took them up again in adulthood, when I was old enough for fairy tales, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis. In fact, all the fairy tales I’ve read I did as an adult, and I did it for myself. Normally, adult fans of children’s literature have children of their own to read to and find books for, or they work teaching young children, or they are academics in fields related to folklore studies. Few deviate from this pattern, from what I can see, and it is usually because they have a personal connection to fairy tales and mythology, as has been my case.
I’ve been focusing on fairy tales for years as a reader, amateur student of the subject, and reviewer/critic, and there are so many things I have learnt, rediscovered, and understood better in the process of reading as many as possible. The first lesson that stands out from all those years with fairy tales and retellings is that I honestly don’t like the genre as a whole. That is to say, my heart is set exclusively on one specific fairy tale and not on all fairy tales. This tale is, as you may have guessed, Beauty and the Beast.
The reason I became interested in fairy tales again as an adult was Beauty and the Beast, not fairy tales themselves. It has been a decade and a half since my love for this story was born, driven and stimulated by a couple of characters that fit the archetype of Beauty and the Beast perfectly, for their narrative arc, which touches on key themes and points in the original story’s plot. My interest in other fairy tales began as a secondary and complementary development, growing as an extension of my love for Beauty and the Beast, just as Beauty and the Beast was born out of my love for that story all of our regulars know so well. And from there I moved on to retellings. I didn’t start reading them because I love retellings in themselves, but because I wanted to read more Beauty and the Beast. So, for me, that was a second big revelation: I didn’t care about the retellings of Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, The Goose Girl, etc. I can do without those and all the other types of retellings. I cared about Beauty and the Beast retellings.
It was my attempt at diversifying to cover all fairy tales that led to my complete reading exhaustion, a fatigue I couldn’t seem to shake off for a long time, which led to my third big revelation. If I had focused exclusively on B&B (I don’t use the more common abbreviation BatB) as I had in the beginning, such exhaustion wouldn’t have happened. I shot myself in the foot by trying to be inclusive to other tales and all the stories that I simply felt no passion for.
Now we’ve arrived to the raison d’être of this long personal account. Why host Beauty and the Beast on Pawn to Player if this place was built for ASOIAF content? Because Pawn to Player was the origin, the source, and the foundation of it all. When I joined the PtP’s Rereading Sansa and Rethinking Sansa discussion threads that Brashcandie had created and hosted at the w.org forums back in 2011, her discussions had already made relevant contributions to the fandom in terms of studying the character of Sansa Stark, who at the time was much vilified in the ASOIAF/GOT fandoms, and Pawn to Player had pioneered turning the tide. Of course, there were already some fans in those threads and elsewhere talking about Beauty and the Beast integrated into Sansa’s story, you would’ve had to be blind and dumb on top not to see the obvious, more so when George R. R. Martin himself was a fan of the fairy tale and had written an adaptation of it for TV before ASOIAF. He even had an illustration of Sandor and Sansa as Beauty & Beast from Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film hanging on the wall at his house! It was a no-brainer to notice that Sansa’s story with Sandor Clegane was Martin’s very own Beauty and the Beast retelling within ASOIAF, even if not everyone liked it. And it was also obvious that Jaime and Brienne had elements of Beauty and the Beast in their own arc.
But at the time, there were many misconceptions, bad takes, and blatant misrepresentations of the Beauty and the Beast story. There was little serious analysis of it, and except for a fan here and there on social media, most people talked about how “toxic” the story was and some published articles about how the story excused Stockholm syndrome, abusive relationships, teaching women to be submissive, etc. That was the mainstream groupthink at the time. Now it’s hard to imagine all that, because now there are many good fan analysts who understand the story and defend it from the misconceptions of the past, but back then the outlook was disheartening. It was in this context that I proceeded to create the project “Examining the Beauty and the Beast Motif in ASOIAF” for Pawn to Player, with the enthusiastic participation of several regular PtPers and a beautiful poster by our friend Magdalena, the artist known as Bubug.
The best of that project is selected for permanent hosting on this site, although not everything had the depth we would’ve wanted and, our contributors and ourselves being mere fans and not trained experts, it may contain mistakes. I like to think that we were amongst the first defenders of B&B, and of course we had disagreements and disputes in defence of the tale, whether because of the original story itself or because of the story rooted in Sansa’s, because there’s always been controversy over SanSan. At times, that project was a discouraging experience, but time proved it worthwhile. A decade and a half later, I believe the fairy tale has a better reputation, although there are still misunderstandings about it circulating out there, and this is a victory won by the old-time B&B fans. Today’s casual readers of any B&B adaptation have no idea that they are standing on the shoulders of those old-time fans, they have no idea that when they say “a pretty girl + a hero with scars on his face does not equal Beauty and the Beast,” they are repeating concepts from the B&B pioneers. It’s all taken for granted, as if it had always been obvious and common knowledge, and not the product of painstaking work of years by several people.
For example, my interpretation of the Beast’s curse as the result of child molestation and grooming by the fairy godmother, based on the original French text by Madame de Villeneuve wasn’t the norm, I don’t recall even other B&B fan-experts knew it. I first published my observation on the PtP, and it was a surprise that caused some to message me in private about it, because they didn’t know about this from the original tale, and to this day there are even some folklore scholars I could name that tend to downplay it or dismiss it because the abuser is a woman and the abused is a minor male. There’s a clear need for a place to collect, organise, and preserve for posterity all the material related to Beauty and the Beast that I have outside of the PtP project. I have all of that on the Goodreads platform, but that site is likely to disappear one day, and my B&B material and reviews of fairy tale retellings would be lost.
So the way forward is: a permanent site to host a permanent project. What better place for it than Pawn to Player? To me, it feels like a natural development, circling back to where it all started and continuing there, regardless of whether we ever see TWOW or if ASOIAF is ever completed, the Pawn to Player evolves and lives on.
A Tale Transformed: Reexamining ‘Beauty and the Beast’ will be a modest endeavour at first, naturally. We will start with two regular features: a review of Beauty and the Beast retelling books or of one with similar elements/vibes and adjacent tales, and interviews with authors that have published something in the genre. Over time, we hope to add a Hall of Fame for the best retellings, and non-fiction, academic articles, and in the very, very long term, we would like the project to accommodate my one big dream: a writing contest, the sponsorship of an anthology, an award for B&B retellings. All under our brand name.
You might say that B&B is too limited and restrictive a niche, and I would say yes, it is. But that is the limited and restrictive niche that needs this investment of time, resources, and mental energy. And there’s also a pragmatic side: it’s a niche that I can easily fill because no one is. There are many critics, bloggers, Booktubers, Booktokers, and podcasters focused on fairy tales and their adaptations at large, and countless folklore enthusiasts who read retellings and review them all the time. But, as far as I know, almost no one focuses exclusively on B&B retellings, which is surprising for the most popular fairy tale in the world that has dozens of books published every year with it as the core theme.
Finally, there was a fourth big revelation on this journey, cemented by my latest book of fairy tales, ironically entitled “Requiem for Fairy Tales” (this was totally unintentional and fortuitous, one of those strange coincidences in my life that I’ll have to attribute to the Universe giving me a wink and nudge): What I really like, more than “pure” retellings, is what an author friend, Beka Gremikova, calls “Folkloric Fantasy.” I don’t know if it’s an official genre name or just what Beka Gremikova came up with to name it, but here’s what it is: Fantasy that reads like a fairy tale, but is neither a fairy tale nor a retelling of one. It may have elements from a specific tale or a handful of collective fairy tale motifs/themes/archetypes, either in general or from the tradition of a specific country. Does it make sense? I can cite examples of books that fit the description if you’re not sure of my meaning, but just to give a few clues, that’s essentially what authors like Naomi Novik or Katherine Arden do.
Folkloric Fantasy is much more varied and flexible than proper retellings because it doesn’t have to follow the plot of a fairy tale, it doesn’t depend on the framework of a fairy tale, and (something very important to me, as I am strict about respecting the core themes of a tale) it doesn’t have to respect a fairy tale’s core theme, as it isn’t subject to any. The genre can play more freely with themes, motifs, plots, and elements, and it can twist fairy tales much more impunity than retellings. In short, it’s like what Historical Fantasy is to Historical Fiction: more room for creative licence and historical anachronisms that would be unforgivable in traditional Hist-Fic. Similarly, in Folkloric Fantasy you can forgive what you can’t overlook in traditional retellings.
That flexibility allows me to enjoy not only Beauty and the Beast-adjacent stories, but also other fairy tales in a way that traditional retellings don’t allow. Many years ago, when I was looking for more books by a Spanish author, Laura Gallego, who had written a short retelling of Beauty and the Beast (more irony!), I got my initial suspicion that Folkloric Fantasy was my thing rather than retellings. I had loved Gallego’s short story and wanted more, and I found out she had written a book called “All the Fairies in the Realm.” Because of the title and her previous short retelling, I mistook it for a fairy tale retelling and spent the entirety of the book trying to guess which fairy tale she was rewriting. In the end, I felt foolish and ignorant because I couldn’t identify the fairy tale, as it had many motifs from various tales, and concluded that I didn’t possess enough knowledge to pinpoint such a complex mix of several tales. I had no idea that I had just discovered Folkloric Fantasy.
That book whetted my appetite for more books of that kind, although for years I continued to mistake Folkloric Fantasy for traditional retellings. It had the effect of broadening my scope of B&B to include books that were not “retellings” per se, but had the vibe in one way or another. My B&B collection thus became full of titles that aren’t retellings of the tale but that have so many similarities that anyone could mistake them for B&B retellings, and that subconscious association was probably the beginning of my eventual discovery of what I really want from this genre, as well as enabling me to have a personal definition of B&B that is probably more ample than most people’s, and that I don’t understand retellings the same way other readers do. But it wasn’t until I met Beka Gremikova and her circle of charming indie writers that I finally learnt a name for this.
All that said, the short-term goal for A Tale Transformed is to build a reputation before I can think about a larger, more ambitious project. Although I am fairly well known in the community of amateur book reviewers, outside of it I have no online presence and no reviews outside of Goodreads. Some popular Booktube and Booktok reviewers have a wide reach, and there are some who have been focusing on fairy tales and retellings in general for years and already have an established audience and reputation, but in my case, my reviews without a home of their own are all I have in terms of clout. Can you imagine what the sensible world of literary awards would think if an unknown girl suddenly burst onto the stage with a pretentious award for fairy tale retellings? They would laugh me out of the room!
The objective is that this becomes a “brand” for reviews of B&B retellings and, yes, Folkloric Fantasy books too, something with a name that the bookish public will easily recognise and authors will see and know as a reliable source of book reviews and analysis. That way, when the time comes to create an award for retellings as is my one overarching goal, it won’t be unexpected. Because by then, just by seeing the name of the award, people would immediately know that it is reliable, serious, and here to stay.
It’s exciting, but also scary, and perhaps rather ambitious. I’m used to anonymity, and I know that this expanding online presence would expose me more than I’m used to. Those that knew my work as Milady of York don’t know my reviewer persona as Marquise, and vice versa. But I know there’s loyal followers we can count on that have showed enthusiasm for this new direction, and at the very least, this will be useful in saving my material from loss,
We will see where the yellow brick road takes us, my Dorothies!
