I'll have to get that, Leckie. I'm a Roald Dahl fan, but I've never come across that before.

There are a lot of authors who do fairy tale retellings. Gail Carson Levine did a great retelling of Cinderella with Ella Enchanted. Robin McKinley did my favorite version of Beauty and the Beast with Beauty.

Some of them I don't like, though. Some put the fairy tales in a more modern setting, without changing key elements that would help them better adapt to that modern setting. Kind of like how R&J was done with DiCaprio and Danes. There's just always something that doesn't quite sit well with fairy tales done improperly.

There's a book out there called "Red as Blood" that has different takes on old fairy tales.

Snow White, for example, was a vampire. "Hair black as ink, skin white as snow, lips red as blood", and all that. That explains why the stepmother was trying to kill her, and why she was allways looking into a magic mirror.

With Sleeping Beauty, the prince came one day too soon, and failed. His ghost guides someone else to finish the quest, but Sleeping Beauty has been asleep too long, and everyone else in the castle has died. Even she isn't fully alive anymore, having slept for over 100 years and lost everything.

Beauty and the Beast was set in the future, where the "Beast" is an alien from a race that came to Earth and saved the enviroment.

I don't remember much of the other stories, but they were good, if a tad bit religious sometimes.

Red as Blood or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer was Tanith Lee. I like Tanith Lee's own personal fairy tale in her Black Unicorn series. I do not, however, like her retelling of fairy tales. I think her tales lose much in the retelling because she loses the element of the story in trying to make them far too dark and far too gothy.

There is a series out there by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling where they gather fairy tale retellings from a multitude of authors into collections. It's six books strong now.

Snow White, Blood Red; Black Thorn, White Rose; Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears; Black Swan, White Raven; Silver Birch, Blood Moon; and Black Heart, Ivory Bones are how the anthology goes.

Some stories are very very good, very true to the original tale, but still presented well in the setting they're placed in. Some of them are very contrived, and purposefully very dark, again like Lee's tales, and lose much in retelling.

While I've never read Mercedes Lackey's normal fantasy books, she does have two I greatly enjoy. Firebird is a retelling of an old Russian myth, and The Black Swan is an ingenious retelling of the Swan Lake story. Orson Scott Card has another I've enjoyed. Enchantment is his version of Sleeping Beauty, mixed with a bit of Russian folklore, and is a very good book.

[ 08-23-2002: Message edited by: Lyinar Ka`Bael ]