From Gregory Maguire's Wicked - a Wizard of Oz retelling which puts the wicked witch centre stage - to Marissa Meyer's cyborg-Cinderella in The Lunar Chronicles, the popularity of fairytale retellings endures and it's easy to see why. Fairytales are timeless. We enjoy them as children and they still delight us as adults. Reading a fairytale is like returning to a favourite childhood memory, and what writer doesn't want to tap into that nostalgia?
But what is a fairytale? A dictionary definition is: a story about fairies or other mythical or magical beings, especially one of traditional origin told to children. Mythical beings you can expect to find in them include: fairies, elves, pixies, dragons (who doesn't love a dragon story?), goblins, giants, mermaids and, of course, plenty of talking animals.
Fairytales take the fabric of the real world and enrich it with magic. Beanstalks can take us into the clouds, carpets can fly us across the globe, and at every turn there are witches, stepmothers and evil queens trying to steal our happy endings.
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For it is the happy ending that unites all fairytales. They may be dark, twisted and occasionally gruesome, but the princess always finds her true love in the end; the hero always vanquishes their foe. Love and happiness conquer all.
But it can also be argued that many fairytales are ridiculously outdated. Where are the princesses who want to marry other princesses? Or the ones who don't want to get married at all. Why is the girl always weak and in need of rescue? Why, in Western culture, are they almost exclusively white? Fairytales need to be rewritten for the modern age. They need to represent the amazing, multicultural societies we live in. They need to celebrate love in all its forms. They need to be retold.
This was the inspiration behind my own series of fairytale retellings, where I reversed the genders of princes and princesses - so Snow White became Snowdon, and Cinderella's Prince Charming became Princess Charmaine. I wanted girls who could rescue those they loved and boys who were more than a silent love-interest with a sword. I'm now three stories into the series (Mirrored Snow, Princess Charming and Skin Deep) but I have plans for so many more. The possibilities for fairytale retellings are endless.
