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In his Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettelheim say this about fairy tales, "…more can be learned from them about the inner problems of human beings, and of the right solutions to their predicaments in society, than from any other type of story…" Below are several fairy tales which some contemporary writers have adapted and amplified to novels for adults.
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 Enchantment,
by Orson Scott Card
This is Card’s take on the story of Sleeping Beauty. He sets it in the Ukraine and America. Young Ivan first sees Katerina, the sleeping princess, when he is a 10-year-old; wandering in his cousin, Marek’s woods. Terrified by the atmosphere of malevolence surrounding her, he runs away. Years later, Ivan, the American graduate student, returns to the Ukraine to do research for his thesis on Russian folklore and again sees the princess, whom, over the years he had come to perceive as a figment of his youthful imagination, still sleeping in a chasm with a bear preventing her rescue. When he does the obvious thing, she awakens and takes him back to her own time. Ivan finds that the folk tales he has studied--and the magic in them--have a basis in fact. Card’s usual lovely clarity of writing and his characteristic humor make this an (oh, sorry!) enchanting tale. Jack, the Giant Killer, by Charles de Lint Charles de Lint writes in the genre known as Urban Fantasy. His novels offer a mixture of gritty contemporary city life and the joy and excitement of magic. You don’t have to read all of his books or even read them chronologically, but it’s a lot more fun if you do. In this tale, Jacky Rowan's boyfriend has just dumped her. Jacky feels stale and rejected until she has a brush with magic which enables her to see the world of Faerie which co-exists with ours. Soon she is involved a battle between good and evil against creatures who, if they should win, will plunge our world into nightmare along with their own. Along the way Jacky finds love in Eilian, the handsome son of a Laird of Dunlogan.
McKinley is the best of those who rework fairy tales. Her version of Beauty and the Beast entitled – appropriately enough – Beauty is not to be missed. Spindle’s End is equally good. In it McKinley tells the story of Sleeping Beauty in 400-plus pages. And every page is well worth the reading. Briar Rose is not your typical fairy tale princess. She lives in a backwater village and wants to apprentice to a blacksmith. She prefers breeches to gowns. When she finds that she is indeed a princess she is appalled as she sees her freedom rapidly receding into the distance. This is a rich story, full of humor and wonder – not least the world of talking animals and their societies. Other retold tales for your reading pleasure are Deerskin, by McKinley, Just Ella, by Haddix, The Nightingale, by Dalkey, and Beast, by Napoli |
