Tag Archives: Fairy Tale

The Witcher and Other Tales

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Book cover of The Witcher: The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

The second season of the acclaimed television show The Witcher came out on December 17th and I, for one, am eager to bingewatch! I vividly remember watching the first season with my mom in the winter of 2019 (which wow, what a different world it was then). I went into it with low expectations (I was skeptical of Henry-Cavill-as-Geralt, who as far as I knew was supposed to be a grizzled old man) and finished it pleasantly surprised that I’d enjoyed it as much as I did.

This November, I finally read the book that the first season is based on—The Last Wish, which is actually the prequel to the series. I don’t know how I missed it (and plan to re-watch the first season to pick up on the clues) but The Last Wish is made up of several rewritten fairytales. Renfri, for example, is a parallel to Snow White! WHAT!

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Adult Summer Reads: Fantastic Worlds

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Take a break from reality by delving into these unique, magical, out-of-this-world reads.

Instagram: vaughanpubliclibraries

Reading fantasy novels is often seen as a way to escape real life—and that’s definitely a big draw. There’s always some current event happening that makes us want to stick our heads in the sand and ignore it all. But sometimes fantasy can be used as a way to explore real issues, just using a different, carefully-controlled lens. I tend to read a lot of fantasy written by women, because I find that female fantasy authors use their writers’ magic to create worlds where female characters are given all the agency they wouldn’t have in, say, a realistic historical novel. So naturally, when I put together our Fantastic Worlds reading list, the ones I was personally drawn to all made me analyze their different representations of female characters.

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Pinocchio Post-Pinocchio

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Scott William CarterFairytales generally end the same way: happily ever after. But I’ve never been able to help but feel that it’s a bit of a stretch to ask me to actually believe that they do just sort of float through life happily ever after, so I love seeing follow-ups to, and riffs off of, some of the more popular traditional fairytales!

In Wooden Bones, Scott William Carter explores concerns I’d say were noticeably absent in the original Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi – why being a real boy is necessarily better than being a wooden puppet, for example*, or developing a concept of identity that is not dependent upon being a boy of flesh and bone – while still adhering more or less to the fairytale structure. Pino, the boy formerly known as Pinocchio (because Pinocchio is too long and cumbersome for everyday use, according to Gepetto), discovers that apart from just being a magical boy, in the sense that he became a real boy only with the aid of magic, he truly is a magical boy, in that unlike regular real boys, he has magical powers.

Of course, these magical powers only bring him trouble (as well as helping him get out of trouble by digging himself a bigger hole), but the trouble is what prompts him to come to the realization that it doesn’t matter whether he’s a real boy or a wooden puppet boy: he’s Pinocchio, and perhaps more importantly, Gepetto won’t love him any less for being one or the other. Continue reading →