Laurabelle's Blog

My latest movie from Netflix is Peau d’âne (Donkey Skin), a French film from Charles Perrault’s fairy tale of the same name. If it were an American movie, I would have expected a complete adulteration of the story. This version was more or less faithful to Perrault’s story, but I was still a bit disappointed because it didn’t add anything more. There’s a lot to be done with that tale (witness Robin McKinley’s Deerskin).

Intermittently during the movie, characters break into song. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Python, but every time the prince started singing, I kept expecting someone to cut him off. That’s not even the only Holy-Grail-esque element; at the end of the film, a helicopter appears! According to IMDB, Peau d’âne was made in 1971 and Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975. I have to wonder if this little French fairy tale wasn’t part of Python’s inspiration for their take on legend.

I just finished reading a retelling of Bluebeard called Fitcher's Brides (from a version of the tale called Fitcher's Bird). I bought the book because I'm a sucker for fairy tales, and because I loved another of Gregory Frost's stories, The Root of the Matter, a retelling of Rapunzel. That story contains what has become one of my favorite quotations:

Turning men into pigs is no particular feat. The real exercise is getting pigs to write checks.

Like The Root of the Matter, Fitcher's Brides contains physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. These are not fairy tales for children.

I'm a sucker for fairy tales, and when Angie Benedetti (KCLS youth selector) got up in front of my Young Adult Materials class last quarter and told us about a retelling of East of the Sun, West of the Moon called East, I was hooked. Edith Pattou has done an excellent job of bringing this fairy tale to life. Although it was never one of my favorite tales, she has made me love not just her version but the story itself.

I recently finished Juliet Marillier's latest novel, Wolfskin, which had been languishing on my holds list for months after I read her fabulous Sevenwaters Trilogy. I loved the Sevenwaters books and liked Wolfskin also but not quite as much, probably because her first trilogy is very much a woman's story as well as inspired by a fairy tale, and Wolfskin (also destined to be a trilogy, I believe) is a male Viking story.

Last week I read a retelling of Beauty and the Beast by Donna Jo Napoli. The interesting thing about her version is that she tells the story from the point of view of the Beast, which can be a very interesting reversal of perspectives (for example, Neil Gaiman's Snow, Glass, Apples, a creepy reversal of Snow White). Unfortunately, I think my verdict in this case is somewhat like what I said about Mary Stewart's Merlin cycle: it demystifies the Beast too much.