5 favorite fairy-tale retellings from Kate Forsyth

Kate Forsyth, author of Bitter Greens (out today!), stops in to share five of her favorite fairy-tale retellings. These aren't your standard fairy tales, either …

Kate: Once upon a time, I was a little girl sick in the hospital and my mother gave me a copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales to comfort me.

The stories in that small red book were full of magic and peril and beauty and danger. I read them so often the book broke, pages flying out like white feathers. It was the story of Rapunzel that meant the most to me, however. I knew what it was like to be alone and afraid, locked away from the world in my hospital ward. Here are five of my favorites, including my own, Bitter Greens.

1) As I grew up, I read and loved many fairy-tale retellings and began to think about writing my own reimagining of Rapunzel. Wondering who first wrote the tale, I stumbled upon the dramatic life story of the 17th-century French noblewoman Charlotte-Rose de la Force, who wrote her version while locked up in a convent for her wild and wicked ways.

I knew at once I had to write about her. She had an affair with Molière's protégé, seduced a marquis with a love spell bought from a witch who would later be burned at the stake, and dressed up as a dancing bear to rescue her much-younger lover — her life was such a gift for a novelist! In my retelling, Bitter Greens, I plaited her story together with a sensuous reimagining of Rapunzel set in Renaissance Venice, a world of desire, obsession and black magic.

2) Many people think fairy tales and retellings of fairy tales are only for children, but I'm not the only writer to take an old tale and retell it for a sophisticated adult audience. Robin McKinley wrote many fairy-tale retellings, but quite possibly her darkest and most powerful novel is Deerskin. A reimagining of All-Kinds-of-Fur, Deerskin tells of an incestuous king who falls in love with his own daughter and seeks to marry her.

3) Juliet Marillier is another writer whose work draws upon fairy tales and folklore. Her novel Daughter of the Forest reimagines the Six Swans fairy tale. Set long, long ago, in Ireland, it tells the story of Sorcha, the younger sister of six brothers, who is compelled to remain mute while weaving shirts from nettles so she may return her swan brothers to human form.

4) A very different fairy tale retelling is The Snow Child by the Alaskan writer Eowyn Ivey. Set in Alaska at the turn of the 19th century, it is a poignant retelling of the Russian fairy tale of the same name, in which an elderly childless couple build a child out of snow and she comes magically to life. A former Pulitzer Prize nominee, the language is simple, spare, yet also powerful and poetic.

5) Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan is a strikingly original and innovative retelling of Rose Red and Snow White, a little-known Grimm tale about two sisters who befriend a bear. Margo Lanagan takes this tale and transforms it into something very different. In her book, sisters Branza and Urdda live with their mother, Liga, in an enchanted world that protects them from the cruelty of the real world. However, where the two worlds touch, strange and terrible things happen. The language is astonishingly good — bold, inventive, unexpected — and the story itself takes all kinds of surprising directions. Tender Morsels won a World Fantasy Award, too, and was also named a Michael L. Printz Honor Book.

Here's the blurb about Bitter Greens:

French novelist Charlotte-Rose de la Force has been banished from the court of Versailles by the Sun King, Louis XIV, after a series of scandalous love affairs. At the convent, she is comforted by an old nun, Sœur Seraphina, who tells her the tale of a young girl who, a hundred years earlier, is sold by her parents for a handful of bitter greens...

After Margherita's father steals parsley from the walled garden of the courtesan Selena Leonelli, he is threatened with having both hands cut off, unless he and his wife relinquish their precious little girl. Selena is the famous red-haired muse of the artist Tiziano, first painted by him in 1512 and still inspiring him at the time of his death. She is at the center of Renaissance life in Venice, a world of beauty and danger, seduction and betrayal, love and superstition.

Locked away in a tower, Margherita sings in the hope that someone will hear her. One day, a young man does.

Find out more about Kate and her books at www.kateforsyth.com.au.