Fairy Tales - Lacey Louwagie

Young Writers Conference: Retold Fairy Tales

This week I gave three presentations on retold fairy tales to elementary and middle-school students at the Conference for Young Writers at SMSU in Marshall, Minnesota. I have very fond memories of this conference, so it’s fun to be able to “give back.” It was the CYW I attended

appearances

My Appearance at Books on Third

The Marshall Area Fine Arts Council (MAFAC) recently opened/rebranded Books on Third, a gift shop that sells awesome artwork, jewelry, and BOOKS by local and regional authors. I was honored to be one of the authors invited to attend the grand opening. I went through the store’s stock

fairy tales

Rumpled Book Talk

A few weeks ago, I traveled back to my hometown to give a talk about my Rumpelstiltskin retelling, Rumpled, as part of the Marshall Area Fine Arts Council (MAFAC’s) read local series, which hosts book discussions with local authors. A recording of the talk is below. In the talk,

Book Reviews

Fairy Tale Book Review: Once Upon a Dream by Liz Braswell

Once Upon a Dream by Liz Braswell My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book was similar in quality to “A Whole New World,” but because I don’t have the same abiding affection for Sleeping Beauty, it did not get the same (perhaps unwarranted) rating inflation. It reminds me

Book Reviews

Fairy Tale Book Review: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is one of the best Maguire books I’ve read, right up there with the first couple Oz retellings (I only read the first two but heard the later ones weren’t as good.) Similar

Book Reviews

Fairy Tale Book Review: Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue

Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins by Emma Donoghue My rating: 4 of 5 stars So I guess I knew who Emma Donoghue was before she was “cool” (i.e., pre-ROOM), since this book has been on my shelf FOREVER … but I didn’t actually read it till

Arabian Nights

Retelling Book Review: The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh

The Wrath & the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is a first novel, and it feels like one. The prose is overwritten and tends toward the purple, and it resorts to using the same descriptions far too often. Like, we don’t need to

Book Reviews

Why Do We Feel the Need to Redeem Rumpelstiltskin?

Over the weekend, I finished reading Rump: The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin by Liesl Shurtliff. It is a middle-grade retelling told from Rumpelstiltskin’s point of view, when he is just 12 years old. This book came out when I was working on later drafts of my own Rumpelstiltskin retelling,

Book Reviews

Retelling Book Review: A Wild Swan and Other Stories by Michael Cunningham

A Wild Swan: And Other Tales by Michael Cunningham My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a collection of stories beautifully retold in Cunningham’s masterful prose. Stories that are haunting in their original form (i.e., “The Monkey’s Paw”) are even more haunting with Cunningham’s treatment,

Book Reviews

Retelling Book Review: Straw Into Gold by Gary Schmidt

Straw Into Gold by Gary D. Schmidt My rating: 3 of 5 stars After years of avoiding Rumpelstiltskin retellings while I worked on my own, it’s been fun to read different interpretations of one of my top three favorite fairy tales. This book takes for its premise that the

Book Reviews

Retelling Book Review: Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier

Guess what I did over the weekend? I started ACTUALLY WRITING on one of my novels again. It felt so good, and I’m so happy to be working on a long-term fiction project again. Cobbling together lots of smaller projects during my writing time makes me feel a little

Blogging

My Year in Disney Movies: Final Thoughts

Reposted from my A Year in Disney Movies blog, which was my primary writing project in 2015 (although I didn’t intend it to be!) Well, we’re halfway into the first month of 2016, there are no unwatched movies in Disney’s animated canon, and it’s officially time

book reviews

Fairy Tale Book Review: Snow White and the 77 Dwarfs by

Snow White and the 77 Dwarfs by Davide Cali My rating: 3 of 5 stars I’m going to let this conversation with my husband serve as my review: Him: This book is stupid! Me: Why is it stupid? Him: It has no point! There’s no moral. Me: It

Book Reviews

Fairy Tale Retelling Book Review: Cress by Marissa Meyer

Cress by Marissa Meyer My rating: 4 of 5 stars I deprived myself of this book for far too long because I didn’t want to read any Rapunzel retellings while I was working on the second draft of my own. But this one was worth the wait. I loved

Book Reviews

Retelling Book Review: Fairest by Marissa Meyer

Fairest by Marissa Meyer My rating: 3 of 5 stars 3.5 Although I didn’t rate this book as highly in the others in this series, some parts of it really impressed me. In a lot of media, villains are treated in one of two ways: as exclusively evil

Book Reviews

Fairy Tale Book Review: A Whole New World by Liz Braswell

I’ve mentioned my fan-fiction days in past entries, as well as my childhood obsession with Aladdin. Well, it seems like my prayer to Disney finally arrived on sympathetic ears 20 years later, when Disney released this darker, more “adult” rendition of its Aladdin story, which releases today. My review

Blogging

Fairy Tale Book Review: Beauty & the Beast

I have been posting to this blog less this year than I used to because most of my blogging energy has gone toward my Year in Disney Movies blog, which has been a greater undertaking than I expected. Disney movies were so interwoven into the fabric of my imagination when

Book Reviews

Fairy Tale Retelling Book Review: Enchanted by Alethea Kontis

Enchanted by Alethea Kontis My rating: 4 of 5 stars 3.5 As this book began, I thought I would adore it. I really liked the tone, which was whimsical while still paying proper deference to the many fairy tale tropes woven throughout the story. This is definitely the most

book reviews

Fairy Tale Retelling Book Review: The Rose Bride by Nancy Holder

The Rose Bride: A Retelling of “The White Bride and the Black Bride” by Nancy Holder My rating: 3 of 5 stars This was an interesting reading experience because I was not familiar with the source material for this book, the fairy tale “The White Bride and the Black Bride.

Book Reviews

Retelling Book Review: Bound by Donna Jo Napoli

Bound by Donna Jo Napoli My rating: 4 of 5 stars It’s been so many years since I’ve read anything by Donna Jo Napoli — I think more than a decade — so I was pleased to find that she still “held up” after all this time, especially since I

book reviews

Retelling Book Review: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey My rating: 4 of 5 stars This book was not what I expected it to be. It was lighter on magic, heavier on Alaskan frontier hardship, but once I adjusted my expectations, I ended up enjoying the book a lot. It is one of

Fairy Tales

My Post and Giveaway on A Backwards Story

My post about What Makes a Good Retelling is up on A Backwards Story, along with a drawing to win a copy of my own retelling, Rumpled. Head over there to enter — and while you’re there, make sure to check out the other posts that are part of the

book reviews

Retelling Book Review: Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson

Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson My rating: 3 of 5 stars I wanted to read this book for a long time — so long that, after I started it and a friend told me it wasn’t worth my time, I insisted that I soldier on, anyway. I don’t

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The Fairy Tale Fortnight Has Begun!

Hey, Fairy Tale Lovers! I want to let you know about a fairy tale extravaganza hosted by The Book Rat and A Backwards Story — a two-week celebration of fairy-tale inspired books and other goodies. The Fortnight will feature a guest post from me about Rumpled on April 8, which will

book reviews

Fairy Tale/Retelling Book Review: The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a collection of fairy tale retellings that, while written in 20th Century, read like classic literature, with long, winding sentences, reflective narrators, and lush descriptions. What doesn’t read so much like classic