Tag Archives: fairy tale retellings

“Wild Hunt” by Katie Hanna

19 Tuesday May 2026

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As I read this book, I kept telling myself I must be hallucinating because the plot looked increasingly like a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” And since I tend to see fairy tales and fairy tale motifs where they weren’t intended, as several authors have already told me, I had to make sure I was still in my right mind. At around the 40% mark, I asked the book’s editor if she saw it too, or if it was just me.

It turns out that yes, Wild Hunt did draw a good amount of inspiration from that fairy tale, and blended it with the mythology of the Wild Hunt in its German version.

I didn’t expect it at all, but this was the best book in the Nightmare Saga yet. Largely thanks to the mythology of the Wild Hunt, but not exclusively, because it’s also because all characters are strong and well-developed, especially the character of the Mennonite girl, Esther Reinhardt.

It took me a while to get into this saga. I was barely hanging on to the first book, Water Horse, because I never warmed to the female main character, Meg, and I liked the villain Sigurd more. When you end up liking the bad guy more than the heroine, you’re in trouble. I fared better with the second book, Black Dragon, because I liked Shufen, and the themes were more serious and better developed in the plot, but as a counter Jack drove me crazy more than is reasonable. With Wild Hunt, I got hooked on sight, and I liked both the plot and the characters from the start.

Even Meg, whom I struggled to sympathise with until now, finally won me over in this book.

So what is it about this third book in the Nightmare Saga that deserves such praise? Let’s go look at it one gallop at a time . . .

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“Lady Agatha Speaks Her Mind” by Elisabeth Aimee Brown

28 Tuesday Apr 2026

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This is the last time I read a “King Thrushbeard” retelling.

The folktale as the Brothers Grimm rendered it is very disagreeable regardless of whether you look at it literally­—as most people will—or metaphorically, as scholars and folklorists do. The reason is that everyone in the tale is obnoxious in some way: the king, the princess, the courtiers, and Thrushbeard. But despite everyone being pricks, only the princess both draws the short stick and gets a redemption. She’s proud, haughty, tactless, superficial, has no value by herself other than as “the king’s daughter,” and humiliates and is verbally abusive to others.

Unlikable person, this princess. It’s left to the men to teach her a lesson in humility through complete humiliation because she does nothing to better herself, which is the part no one likes. The Grimms passed on the version of the folktale in which she’s married off to a beggar against her will as punishment (there were other versions, including one in which she was responsible for this marriage, not her father, and the groom wasn’t a beggar), and their version’s ending puts her father and her beggar-king husband in a bad light as it’s implied they might have schemed together to teach her a lesson, which she does learn.

It’s not a folktale anyone can like, it’s one of two B&B-type folktales that I don’t care for. Not so much for the misogyny of her humiliation ritual as the fact that the princess isn’t innocent and her character did ask for comeuppance but got it from bigger bullies. It’s like a bully getting punished by bullies.

I’d have preferred the Grimms included in their collection the version in which the king doesn’t parade her to all and sundry and the princess alone is responsible for being married beneath her station (to a minstrel) because she attempts to be disloyal and break trust and her word out of petty pride. In that context, it makes sense that she needed to learn to tame her pride and haughtiness. But the Grimms chose what they choose, and we inherited a tale in which everyone sucks.

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“Falling for the Pied Piper” by Ashley Evercott

27 Friday Mar 2026

Posted by in A Tale Transformed, PTP TWOW

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     Selene regretted the crushing heartbreak that vibrated through her soul when an agonized howl echoed through the night.

     The prince had found someone he truly loved. Selene watched the woman flee past the castle gates, her dark hair whipping in the wind, to return home.

     Her heart clenched with shame, but most of all, guilt.

     How could jealousy and rage have blinded her to lash out at an innocent being? The anger she had directed toward him was misplaced. All her insecurities, shame, and loneliness were due to a lifetime of proving herself to a man who would never be satisfied. The prince did not deserve this fate—he did not deserve to perish as a beast.

Thank you, Ashley Evercott, for writing these lines. Finally, someone admits that the enchantress that cursed the prince into a beast did very, very wrong and deserves no excuse whatsoever.

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“Angelica and the Bear Prince” by Nguyen Trung Le

14 Saturday Mar 2026

Posted by in A Tale Transformed

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Do you think such a thing as a “meta-retelling” exists, my dear Vicomte? The encyclopedias tell me there’s metanarrative as a formal academic name for this kind of storytelling technique that I discovered in today’s reading. It’s not striking me as fitting this story quite as nicely as “meta-retelling,” though, so I think I shall be formally coining the term for this style of storytelling from now on.

The book I wanted to share my thoughts on with you is a graphic novel, Angelica and the Bear Prince, that was marketed as a retelling of the Norwegian fairy tale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” one of those links in the evolutionary chain from Greek myth to French fairy tale that you can spot in the history of Beauty and the Beast. But I would call it a meta-retelling because it isn’t a retelling, not even a loose one, nor is it a parallel story to mark the main story’s beats. It’s a fairy tale that has been placed within the book’s plot and is already retold independently of Angelica and Gable’s story (yes, bet you didn’t notice that the fairy tale is presented here as already retold on its own) and that evolves on its own with only the slightest touches of the main plot.

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“The Edge of a Knife and Other Stories” by Beka Gremikova

01 Monday Dec 2025

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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.

Now, onto the stories themselves:

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