Enchanted Conversation is Back!

Beatrix Cottonpants feels compelled to correct her title there -- while online fairy tale magazine Enchanted Conversation never actually went anywhere, it looked like it would for some time, so it's nice to know it'll be sticking around.

For writer types out there, check out their new guidelines. Otherwise, the Little Red Riding Hood issue will be up soon, and then new contests and content in January.

Fairy Tale Feature: Anne Ursu's Breadcrumbs

Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories. You understand that there is the surface and then there are all the things that glimmer and shift underneath it. And you know that not everyone believes in those things, that there are people -- a great many people -- who believe the world cannot be any more than what they can see with their eyes. (Breadcrumbs, Chapter 5: The Mirror)




Let's just start by saying that Breadcrumbs, by Anne Ursu, came highly anticipated. Ever since Betsy Bird, she of Fuse#8 fame,  wrote in her blog :

To my mind, Ursu does for Hans Christian Andersen in this book what Adam Gidwitz did for The Brothers Grimm in his A Tale Dark and Grimm, 


Beatrix Cottonpants has felt compelled to flag down any messenger pigeons, magic mail owls, or pony expresses that strayed off the path and passed by her house, just to see if they had the book. Luckily for them (and her. And you!), Breadcrumbs does not disappoint.

 Hazel and Jack are best friends, always and forever. Sure, it can be hard for a boy and a girl to remain best friends as they grow up, especially when there are competing forces threatening their attention, they still find time to go sledding or to talk about books and stories or draw pictures together. At least it seems that way until an accident at school seems to transform Jack, rendering him cold and completely uninterested in Hazel. Her suspicions that something is actually, truly. and maybe magically wrong indeed are confirmed when Jack goes missing with a highly ridiculous alibi, and Hazel sets off into the woods to bring him home. In the woods, she finds a world unlike any she's ever known outside of the books she loves, a world that might have existed in the mind of Hans Christian Andersen, and must find her way through the forest to find the Snow Queen and her prisoner, Jack.

There is something very magical about Breadcrumbs, and that perhaps has to do with the way Ursu handles the presence of magic in Hazel's world. Part One of the book, which takes place in the real world, reads like middle grade contemporary realistic fiction: Hazel wrestles with the fact that Jack might be growing away from her, and finds it almost a relief to learn that he might have been taken away by a white Queen in a sleigh drawn by huge dogs, or something like it. While Hazel struggles with worries about her friendship with Jack, and her place in the world (as a girl with a boy for a best friend, a child adopted into a family of a different ethnicity than her own, and a fan of fantasy literature, she has a hard time finding other people with whom she feels comfortable), Ursu breaks away to tell the rest of the fairy tale: the goblin's mirror breaks and turns everything it touches ugly and twisted, a witch in white claims the boy with the shard of mirror in his eye. The magic is very matter of fact, and yet at the heart of the novel is the conflict of reconciling magic with real life, especially the real life of someone who is growing up, and who worries that magic is for babies and that she will have to leave it behind.

 At ten years old, Hazel is easily relate-able for kids reading this book, who may be struggling with growing up too fast or what they believe is too slow, who can't find a way to keep the magic in their lives. How perfect to turn to fairy tales to address this question, especially the tales of Andersen, who used them to work through any number of issues that continue into adulthood. Anyone Hazel's age should read this book, and anyone older than Hazel, especially those who believe magic is for children, should especially read this book.


Check out Anne Ursu's website for more information about Breadcrumbs, The Cronus Chronicles, or her books for adults.
Review of Breadcrumbs on Fuse#8
Fairy Tale Feature: A Tale Dark and Grimm
Learn more about Hans Christian Andersen and his stories at The Hans Christian Andersen Center

Once Upon a Time Recap: Girl Fight

This week on Once Upon a Time, there were all sorts of hijinx, and plenty of secrets revealed.

We begin with the town waking up to discover that the clock has started moving again, resulting in, well, actually very little. Sure, there are some half smiles, some resolved glances, but if I lived in a world where the clocks never moved, and that was a thing, I might think the world was ending. I would at least bring it up in conversation. Everyone in Storybrooke, however, seems nonplussed by the situation, except for those who know what's up.

Anyway.

From there, we move to the Mayor menacing people in that way she does. She confronts Henry about the missing pages in his book, and then goes over to Emma's rented room to present her with a basket of apples (the symbolism is not lost here, and Lana Parrilla pulls it off really well. Does anyone else love her as the Evil Queen?), and from there on, it's a fight. Emma won't leave until she knows Henry is okay, and Regina wants her gone, like, yesterday. Some highlights:

Regina gets Emma arrested by framing her for stealing a file from Henry's psychiatrist.

Emma chops a branch off Regina's apple tree.

Regina gets Emma kicked out of Little Red's grandma's boarding house.

Emma talks to Henry's teacher.

Regina arranges for Henry to overhear Emma calling his fairy tale world idea crazy.

Like this looks like checkmate for the Evil Queen, Emma manages to track down Henry and convince him that she believes him and wants to help. So there.

Meanwhile, back in the old world, the Queen is trying to get that pesky dark curse to work.  Turns out collecting the hair of the darkest souls in the land and sacrificing her prize steed just don't cut it, which is very frustrating, considering all the trouble she went to to get her dark curse back from Maleficient, played by True Blood's delightful Kristin Bauer (in a nice twist, it's revealed that she borrowed another curse from Maleficient, a sleeping spell that was a little less effective on Snow White than one Sleeping Beauty). When she visits the one who gave her the curse in the first place, we learn that:

Cage or no, Rumpelstiltskin is the boss of everything in this place. He provided the curse, the prophecy, and we later find out, Henry. Most mysterious character prize goes to the goldspinner for sure.

If she enacts the curse, the Queen will be plagued with a sense of emptiness she can never fill.

To make it work, she needs to sacrifice the thing she loves most, which is obviously not her horse.

So she goes back home to discuss matters with the thing she loves most (aside, of course, from whomever Snow White took away from her -- she could mean Snow White's dad, but Beatrix Cottonpants has another theory she's keeping hush-hush for now. Soon, my pretties), which turns out to be -- her dad. After this revelation, he's got about a scene to suggest they just start a new life somewhere, before the Queen literally stabs him in the back for the good of the curse.

Cold. Really cold. That's what we can about that.

So we end the show, knowing a little more about the Queen, a little less than we want to about Rumpelstiltskin, and watching Emma and Henry start hatching their plan. Next week, Snow White meets her prince!

Grimm Starts Tonight!

Once Upon A Time started on Monday, and it's closely followed by the premiere of Grimm tonight on NBC. Grimm, like Once Upon A Time, posits that fairy tales are true, and that the main character of the show (in this case, clueless NAME as CHARACTER) has a history based in these fairy tales.

This show is, shall we say, a bit grimmer than Once Upon a Time. Nick Burkhardt is a cop, living and working in the tree lined land of Portland, where girls in red hoodies are apparently demolished in the woods on something of a regular basis. It's just the case for our friend Nick, who learns that he, through his family, is a Grimm: he can see the fairy tale beasties no one else can, making him an ideal choice for fighting them.

You can watch a preview on demand now, or wait until tonight. I did watch the preview, and while I'll watch the last 25 or so minutes of the pilot, I did not find it as successful as Once Upon a Time. I watched for 23 minutes after all, and I still had to look up the main character's name to write this post. However, there seems to be an attempt to use the truly little known, and admittedly creepy, creatures featured in the tales of the Brothers Grimm (think hexenbiests and blutbads), so things might pick up.

Has anyone watched yet? What are your thoughts?

Once Upon a Time Premieres

Warning: Spoilers 

ABC's Once a Upon a Time finally premiered last night, and fairy tale fans everywhere rejoiced! And by rejoiced, I mean, of course, settled in to watch the show, perhaps with a cup of tea, in footie pajamas.

Rejoicing could be well in order, though; while so many many things could potentially go wrong in a show that addresses fairy tales and the real world in such an obvious way, this one seems to be on the right track. The premise holds that once upon a time, Snow White's evil and super controlling stepmother decided that attempted murder via poisoned apple was not dastardly enough, and so made a plan to afflict the enchanted wood in which she and every other fairy tale character live with a vague evil spell that works literally as a cloud of black smoke. Once touched by the spell, the denizens of the enchanted wood are trapped in Storybrooke, Maine, a typical little town where time happens to stand still and things are purportedly awful. You see, no one ever gets a happy ending in Storybrooke, and whenever someone tries to leave, calamity befalls.

Except, for some reason, small boys, but we'll get to that. Let's instead talk about Emma Swan, the main character of the show. Emma (played by House and How I Met Your Mother veteran Jennifer Morrison) is a loner, a bailbondsperson and human lie-detector who has no friends and, she believes, no parents. Her surprisingly sullen existence is disrupted by the arrival of that small boy from earlier, who informs her that:

1. He is her own son, a child she gave up for adoption as a teenager

2. He hails from her true home of Storybrooke, where all those fairy tale characters are waiting for Snow White's daughter to return and set them all free from the Wicked Queen's curse

The mayor stands suspiciously close to
some likely poisoned apples

She doesn't believe a word, but she does the responsible thing and drives him home, where things are, admittedly enough, a little weird. His adoptive mother, the mayor of the town, is in turns sweet and alarmingly hostile, the clock never does move, and  the boy's teacher seems to know more than she's letting on, especially considering she gave him the boy that explains how and why everyone ended up in a world without happy endings.

After more than a few suspicious encounters, a car accident and one runaway attempt, Emma decides that she'd better stay after all, and bunks in a boarding house run by Little Red Riding Hood's Granny, who's obviously having a trying time raising teenage Red.

Snow White and her Prince, in shinier times

Emma's story is broken up by flashbacks of the enchanted wood: the wedding of Snow White and Prince Charming (who, in this rendition, gets to be more than a pretty face with odd necrophiliac tendencies), the threat of the Evil Queen's curse, the plan to send the baby away so that she might return later, according to the prophecy made by the clearly unstable and devious Rumpelstiltskin. The enchanted wood is as glossy as beautiful as it should be, and the real world looks appropriately stark and dingy in comparison.



While you can never tell how long something like this will work, Once Upon A Time does seem to be off to a good start. At its core, it's a story about families. A boy looks for his birth mother, who in turn must find her true parents, one of whom calls the Wicked Queens herself Stepmother. The explorations of these relationships serve as a nice core for a show that could otherwise get a little farfetched.

What did you think? Will you keep watching?

Fairy Tale Feature: Marjane Satrapi's The Sigh

Remember this post, a few weeks ago, about exciting things coming out in the near future? Well, even earlier than expected, Marjane Satrapi's The Sigh found Beatrix Cottonpants and followed her home.

The Sigh is an original story told perfectly in the rhythm and style of a folktale, an animal bridegroom tale at its core. Rose, the third daughter of a generous merchant, lets out a sigh when her father is unable to find the one gift she truly wants: the seed of a blue bean. As if summoned, a wispy creature called Ah the Sigh appears with the bean and extracts a promise from the merchant. Sure enough, one year later, Ah comes back for Rose. She agrees, the way resourceful and good fairy tale girls do, to go with him, and finds herself in something like a resort: massages and facials every day, swimming and study, live performances every night. Of course, she misses her family, and her return home is her downfall. With her curiosity peaked, Rose returns to the Kingdom of Sighs and makes a mistake that could cost her her new home.

Let's pause here to talk about Ah the Sigh. Ah is a creature who comes from Persian folklore, most famously chronicled in the movie The Legend of the Sigh (1991), directed by Tahmineh Milani. In the movie, the Sigh appears to young ladies who announce their problems to the world with a sigh, and he endeavors to fix them. In this next part of Satrapi's book, she functions in this role herself, requesting that Ah sell her as a slave to three separate homes. In one, she meets a wealthy woman whose son is lost. In another, a man whose son is a voracious son, and in a third, a woman who cuts off her husband's head each night to slips out for no good reason. It is only through these interactions, and how Rose handles them, that she can hope to discover how to solve her own problem.

The Sigh is a masterful representation of an original folktale. Satrapi's style is spot on, and still she manages to capture her own voice. Famous for Persepolis, a set of graphic novels describing her own life during Iran's Cultural Revolution, Satrapi has a unique drawing style, particularly when it comes to people, and her expressive faces and minimalist backgrounds are all over this book, brightly colored and well placed. It should be noted, though, that this is not a traditional graphic novel. Instead of panels and word bubbles, Satrapi tells her story in prose, breaking up short blocks of text with her images. It's a unique, not frequently seen way of telling a story (though not unheard of -- check out this version of Neil Gaiman's Stardust if you like this idea), and the publishing company behind this book, Archaia, should be watched for more innovative formats in the future.

One more thing -- even if Beatrix Cottonpants could make an ereader work under the sea, she would recommend getting this one in hard copy. On top of everything, the book itself is stunning, and will look mighty nice on your shelf between Cooking with Children and How to Get Blood Out of Anything. Mighty nice.

Read more about Marjane Satrapi and Persepolis
Read more about The Legend of the Sigh
Learn more about Archaia 
Check out Beatrix Cottonpants' take on the animal bridegroom tale, The Alien Bridegroom

Fairy Tales Are the Stuff of Nightmares

Look, Beatrix Cottonpants knows that fairy tales are dark and dangerous, and not necessarily the sort of thing to read to your toddlers before they wander off into dreamland. She knows that, and she bets you know that, too.

She can't help but notice, though, the relatively recent trend of calling out fairy tales on their darkness. Books, movies, television shows lately all seem to offer a dark twist on a classic tale, as if the classic tale had no dark twist of its own. Of course, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Recognizing the dark in fairy tales is certainly preferable to pretending there is no dark at all, or sanitizing the stories to such a degree that the events lose all meaning.

But that is a tangent, and today's post is really just supposed to draw your attention to this:




Nightmare, NYC's famous pop-up Haunted House (open every year around Halloween), has chosen this year to focus on the horror of fairy tales. According to Nightmare's website, in this year's attraction, you can:

Get lost in a dark forest and wander through the woods while becoming the characters and reliving the terrifying experiences extracted from over a dozen twisted stories handed down by The Brothers Grimm, Aesop, Hans Christian Anderson, and more. Try and stay on the path as you go from cottage to cottage - each housing a familiar tale told in the way they were intended - to scare the wits out of you!(Nightmare Fairy Tales website: About)

Normally, Beatrix Cottonpants finds the ghosts in her own house frightening enough, thank you very much, but she might just have to make her way out of the dark and tangled woods and into the city for this one. If you're thinking the same, check out Nightmare's website for more info.