Reading Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s The Stinky Cheese Man: And Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992) was a truly formative childhood literary experience for me. In this spectacularly subversive collection, a princess is tricked into kissing a devious frog who’s no prince at all, while the ugly duckling grows into an equally hideous swan. My appetite for fractured fairy tales was whetted. Happily, the 21st century has been rife with creative retellings, among them David Wiesner’s The Three Pigs (2001), Adam Gidwitz’s A Tale Dark and Grimm (2010), and Laurel Snyder and Dan Santat’s Endlessly Ever After: Pick Your Path to Countless Fairy Tale Endings! (2022).
Kid lit authors are still breaking new ground. With The Fairy Tale Fan Club: Legendary Letters Collected by C.C. Cecily (Walker US/Candlewick, 2024), actor and author Richard Ayoade casts folktale characters as celebrities of sorts, receiving mail from devoted fans with questions galore: How did Red Riding Hood mistake her grandmother for a wolf? What advice does Rapunzel have for someone mulling “the big chop”? The responses are just as witty: Granny’s on the hirsute side, while Rapunzel replies with a pros-and-cons list in which pixie cuts win the day. This archly funny middle-grade work, illustrated by David Roberts, encourages young people to become active, engaged readers.
Grimms’ Fairy Tales, an anthology by Sandra Dieckmann (Candlewick, September 23), is more earnest in tone, largely hewing to the source material, but it nevertheless makes a much-needed contribution to the genre. In Dieckmann’s lush artwork, same-sex couples dance at Cinderella’s ball, while characters are racially diverse, and the author/illustrator often describes babies with they/them pronouns. The result is, to quote the Kirkus review, a “boldly inclusive” and “thoroughly modern fairy-tale anthology.”
Picture-book creators, too, are doing impressive work in this sphere. In Anoosha Syed’s The Salt Princess (Harper/HarperCollins, April 1), a retelling of a Pakistani folktale, a king asks his daughters to describe their love for him. The eldest three compare their devotion to sugar, honey, and sherbet, but free-spirited Amal replies, “I love you like salt”—prompting the insecure king, enraged at being compared to something so common, to exile her. The narrative is infused with a modern sensibility and thoughtful commentary. Amal emerges as a feminist icon, doodling the words “fierce fearless female” on the castle wall, while Syed emphasizes that the king is motivated by a desire for social approval—an issue, as she notes in the backmatter, that remains prevalent in South Asian communities.
Brilliantly blending elements of a beloved fairy tale with real-life American history, Shana Keller’s picture book CeeCee: Underground Railroad Cinderella, illustrated by Laura Freeman (Charlesbridge, August 12), follows an enslaved girl as she plots to leave the plantation one night: not to dance with the prince at the ball, but to flee north to freedom. Folktale fans will recognize familiar characters—cruel Mrs. Townsend (the wife of the plantation owner) is clearly the wicked stepmother, while Binty the cook serves as the fairy godmother—as they absorb lessons about everything from Harriet Tubman to the importance of literacy: Stories are what inspire CeeCee even as Mrs. Townsend forbids her from learning to read.
Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.
