Browsing: Fairy Tales

What makes a villain a villain? I’ve always been a fascinated—and a little bit terrified—of villains, especially in fairytales. As a child, I couldn’t get enough of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs even if the old witch sent me diving into our couch cushions to hide my eyes.

Sarah Mlynowski is the New York Times bestselling author of the Whatever After series as well as Gimme a Call, Don’t Even Think About It, Ten Things We Did (and Probably Shouldn’t Have), How to Be Bad (along with E. Lockhart and Lauren Myracle) and the Magic in Manhattan series. Originally from Montreal, Sarah now lives in the kingdom of Manhattan with her very own prince charming and their fairy-tale-loving daughters.

Everyone’s taste is different, of course, but my favorite fairy tales are ones that are irreducibly strange. When I was drafting my new novel, The Glass Casket, I kept thinking back to the fairy tales that appealed to me as a child. They were often lesser-known Grimm tales, the ones that had not been sanitized—their strangeness muted by a series of cheerful bowdlerizations.

Kate Bernheimer first enchanted children with her captivating The Girl in the Castle inside the Museum. Her latest The Lonely Book is yet another heartfelt addition to her mesmerizing picture books.