Favorite Fairy Tales

I can't remember a time when I wasn't avidly interested in fairy tales, folk tales, and myth. I had the usual suspects in early childhood--fat anthologies with sturdy canvas covers, the dust jackets long gone, that collected a little bit of Grimm, some Hans Christian Anderson, maybe a couple of French or Italian variations. I had skinny illustrated single-shot stories, where the pictures overshadowed the familiar but infinitely varied Beauty and the Beast or Thumbelina.

My favorites were a gorgeous Beauty and the Beast illustrated by Mercer Mayer, who did the popular Little Monster books for young readers. But his B and the B is darker, weirder, wildly romantic, scary, and irresistible.

It's twisted and windy, and the promise of a happy ending seems pretty dubious.

I also loved a little known Grimm tale called The Water of Life, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman. The story of prince on quest gets a welcome detour when we dwell on the endeavors of the princess to rescue him when his treacherous brothers betray him. I love the pictures of the heroine getting things done.

Swords! T-squares! Schematics! Just a couple of lions NBD!

The biggest event in my story consumption was when I was eight and my father started dating the woman who became my step-mother. She gave my brother and me a massive tome of Italian Folk Tales compiled by post-modern rockstar Italo Calvino. It was 200 stories, full of the usual royalty and peasants on quests, but also including a few curve balls: incest, murdered bodies transforming into rosemary bushes, necrophilia, an evil wizard's soul kept safe in a blood-red egg. 

I love stuff like that. I love it when the combined pleasure of familiarity and surprise come together in the matter-of-fact recounting of the fantastic. The characters, which should be flat by virtue of time limit and the prominence of plot, are instead able to assert their courage, their hubris, and their needs in just a few pages.