This tag comes from Dellybird, a blogger based out of the UK. I love fairy tales so much, so I keep looking for fun fairy tale content from different blogs...and this combines fairy tales with book talk, so I'm going to have a lot of fun with this. I hope you do, too.
・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。
Fairy Tale Tag Rules
Answer as many questions as you can!
Tag five fairy tale lovers.
Please tag Dellybird as the creator.
Have fun!
The Questions
1 – Beauty and the Beast
“He’s no monster” – A character that makes mistakes but redeems themselves in the end.
I think Rhen from Brigid Kemmerer's Cursebreaker series does this (and funnily enough, it's a Beauty and the Beast retelling). He makes a lot of mistakes in the books, even resorting to more extreme behavior, where he literally hurts other people, but I think the book does a good job showing his paranoia with the enchantress Lilith, the fear of losing his kingdom, and the difficult decisions he has to make as a leader of a country in trouble. Politics are hard. I know I can't play the game, and I can't make difficult decisions, so I'm sympathetic to Rhen's plight. But I still find him redeemable in the end!
2 – Sleeping Beauty
“Once upon a dream” – A book that sent you to sleep.
My goal is not to name and shame books because I'm an author and I don't want to bring any of my colleagues down, so I am just going to talk around the book I read--it had an interesting premise of science versus magic and had fairy tale qualities to it, with monsters and pretty illustrations, but it took a long time for me to get through. It was a solid three-star book, not bad, but not as great as I hoped it would be.
3 – The Little Mermaid
“Nothing gave her greater pleasure than to hear about the world of human beings up above” – A book that excites you or is full of adventure.
Again, I'm going to try not to list the same books as before, so this time, I choose Julie Kagawa's The Iron King. Meghan's journey through the Fae world and all the creatures and characters she encounters certainly held my attention. I think that, and Holly Black's various Faerie books, along with Cecilia Dart-Thornton's Bitterbynde trilogy, inspired my scenes in Elythia in my own novel, Son of the Siren.
4 – Cinderella
“Perhaps the greatest risk any of us will ever take is to be seen as we really are” – A book where a character is mistreated.
+SPOILERS+
I hate the scene where Jude eats the faerie fruit in Holly Black's The Cruel Prince. The fact that she's stripped down to her underwear and egged on really rubbed me the wrong way. We're talking borderline assault here. And Prince Cardan compelling her to lick his feet...I just cringed at all of the nastiness and bullying in this section.
Actually, Jude is mistreated a lot throughout the Folk of the Air series, which is why I sometimes had a hard time buying the romance in the book. On the other hand, I also had a hard time sympathizing with the fact that people are murdered, too. It's a book filled with extremes.
5 – Peter Pan
“Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away, and away means forgetting” – A book that you will never forget!
Ok, here's the thing. Even books I love, I forget details. For most of the books I've described so far in this post, I had to go back and look up character names and refresh my brain with plot points. I might've even misremembered some of them.
I just can't recall things in books. I can only remember hints of things or the general idea of the book.
In the interest of not choosing Sorcery of Thorns for the billionth time, I'm going to go with an old favorite of mine, Juliet Marillier's Daughter of the Forest. It's a retelling of the Wild Swans that I read while I was in college...I think it's twenty years old or so...and it made me want to write novels and fairy tale retellings. I don't remember everything about it, but I do have specific scenes in my mind that I can still picture. It's a lovely historical fantasy.
6 – The Ugly Duckling
“It is only with the heart that one can see clearly, for the most essential things are invisible to the eye” – A book or character that you love but others don’t see the same way.
Hmm...this one is hard for me, because I think that the books I like are quite popular, and it's usually books that I don't like that people really love.
+SPOILERS+
I'm kinda reaching for this one, but I think I sort of like Locke from The Folk of the Air series. He messes with people and orchestrates a lot of terrible scenarios, but I also like his playfulness. I like him enough, anyway, that I thought he didn't deserve to be murdered. And his murder wasn't made into a big enough deal, in my opinion. People are so blasé about death in that series.
7 – The Princess and the Pea
“She had felt one pea all the way through twenty mattresses and twenty more feather beds” – A book or character that made you uncomfortable.
Wow, I guess I keep coming back to this series, but as much as I enjoyed The Folk of the Air, a lot of it was problematic. The books definitely made me feel a variety of emotions, all of them tending to be on the more extreme side. I love these books but have my own criticisms of them too, it seems. But I do love them.
8 – Little Red Riding Hood
“Oh Granny, what big teeth you have!” – A book or character that wasn’t what they seemed.
Rose Szabo's What Big Teeth is a slow burn of a book filled with characters who are definitely not what they seem, in a house that isn't what it seems, in a family that isn't what it seems.
9 – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
“I’ll take a chance for her” – A book with great friends.
I like the friends group in Kendare Blake's Anna Dressed in Blood series--they're a fun ensemble to adventure with.
10 – Alice in Wonderland
“Who in the world am I? – A book about identity or a character who questions themselves.
I think Voya in Liselle Sambury's Blood Like Magic questions herself and her place in the world a lot, especially when she is trying to awaken her magic, and is tasked with saving the ancestral powers with her family. Then there's trying to find out which ancestor will appear to her and which task will be given to her, and she wonders how she relates to all of that. Then, on top of that, she has to find her true love in order to sacrifice them. There's a lot going on in this book and I think Voya is a sympathetic character. She goes on quite a journey.
Tagged!
So...here's the thing. I'm not really known in the blogosphere and I don't feel comfortable tagging other people. I'm just going to tag you. You can answer on your own blog and be sure to link back in the comments if you decide to participate. Enjoy!
・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。