Lisa Jensen on favorite fairy tales revisited

Lisa Jensen, author of Alias Hook (out today!), highlights some fairy tales that have been revisited for adult audiences.

Lisa: A funny thing happened a few years ago, when I revisited the story of Peter Pan through grown-up eyes. I found I'd developed a soft spot for Captain Hook. OK, I have a thing for pirates anyway, but I could also sympathize with a grown man trapped in a world run by bratty little boys. And when I started wondering who he was, where he'd come from, and what on earth he'd done to deserve such a fate, the spark for my novel, Alias Hook, was born.

As we grow up, we view the fairy tales of our youth from a different perspective. The old tales still enchant, but we suspect there's more to the story if we delve beneath the familiar surface. And who wouldn't find it irresistible to peek into that pumpkin coach, climb that rope of braided hair, open the gingerbread door to find out what's really going on? Here are some of the most interesting modern retakes on these oft-told tales.

• In Wicked, Gregory Maguire reinvents the land of Oz as a country of political infighting, racial intolerance, rebellion and other recognizable forms of societal skullduggery. Daring to cast the Wicked Witch of the West as the misunderstood protagonist, with her own challenges to overcome (hint: It's not easy being green), he came up with an idea so bold, it spawned a whole new genre of revisited fairy tales.

• Set in ancient Persia, Donna Jo Napoli's Young Adult novel Beast is a distinctive take on Beauty and the Beast, with its vivid details of Persian culture and Islamic faith. It also tells the entire story from the viewpoint of Beast, a young prince transformed into a lion for his pride. While magic transforms him, his struggle to survive as a lion, yet maintain his moral and human identity, keeps the story grounded in real-life yearning.

• It takes nerve to retell a fairy tale with no magic at all, but Elizabeth Blackwell rises to the challenge with While Beauty Slept. She imagines a real-world medieval setting in which the events of the Sleeping Beauty tale — as observed by a serving woman to the royal family — might plausibly have occurred. No fairies, no fire-breathing dragon, just an absorbing tale of love, ambition, destiny and family secrets.

• Kate Forsyth also takes a more historical approach to the Rapunzel tale in Bitter Greens — but with a whiff of dark magic. (The title refers to precious ingredients in a youth potion.) The story time-travels backward from the court of the Sun King in Renaissance France to 16th-century Venice, braiding together tales of three imprisoned women, searching for freedom and redemption. One of them is Charlotte-Rose de la Force, the real-life French noblewoman and author who penned an early version of the Rapunzel tale.

I also had redemption in mind when I wrote Alias Hook. What if Hook didn't die in the jaws of that crocodile? What if he's cursed to live on and on in the Neverland, trapped forever fighting the same pointless war with the boys, until something extraordinary happens — like a grown woman who tumbles out of the sky and breaks all the boys' rules. A woman who begins to see in James Hook someone far more complex than the usual storybook villain.

In my book, Captain Hook gets one last chance to rewrite his story, and earn his own Happy Ever After.

Here's the blurb about Alias Hook:

"Every child knows how the story ends. The wicked pirate captain is flung overboard, caught in the jaws of the monster crocodile who drags him down to a watery grave. But it was not yet my time to die. It's my fate to be trapped here forever, in a nightmare of childhood fancy, with that infernal, eternal boy."

Meet Captain James Benjamin Hook, a witty, educated Restoration-era privateer cursed to play villain to a pack of malicious little boys in a pointless war that never ends. But everything changes when Stella Parrish, a forbidden grown woman, dreams her way to the Neverland in defiance of Pan's rules. From the glamour of the Fairy Revels, to the secret ceremonies of the First Tribes, to the mysterious underwater temple beneath the Mermaid Lagoon, the magical forces of the Neverland open up for Stella as they never have for Hook. And in the pirate captain himself, she begins to see someone far more complex than the storybook villain.

With Stella's knowledge of folk and fairy tales, she might be Hook's last chance for redemption and release if they can break his curse before Pan and his warrior boys hunt her down and drag Hook back to their neverending game.

Find out more at ljo-express.blogspot.com.