Announcing Project: Fairy Tale

I just wanted to share a fun and exciting new blog event that I'll be participating in, Project: Fairy Tale. Alison of The Cheap Reader is the creator behind Project: Fairy Tale, a month of fairy-tale related revels which will occur in February or March of 2013.

Each participant selects a fairy tale (or folktale) as the focus for his/her own blog. At the bare minimum, participants will read and post information about the original tale as well as three reviews of retellings of the tale. Of course, this is the bare minimum and participants have the potential to do a lot more with their selected tale over the course of the Project: Fairy Tale month. I'll definitely be posting more than the minimum here. This sounds like a great opportunity to become more familiar with many different fairy tales, as well as some MG/YA retellings. Whether we're aware of them or not, fairy/folktales continue to resonate within our lives in so many ways.

I adore fairy tales and fairy tale retellings. My honors English thesis was an examination of the origins of the original "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale and how the story was retold over the years. Best research paper ever. Seriously. If anyone ever wants "Beauty and the Beast" retelling recommendations or just someone to talk to about the tale, let me know! Before I started Late Nights with Good Books I actually started a blog that focused exclusively on fairy tales and their retellings. That blog died out when I started this blog, so I'd love to have the opportunity to examine fairy tales here.

Because I've been interested in fairy tales for a while now, I wanted to use this event to give myself the opportunity to learn more about a tale with which I'm not as familiar. I decided on the Scottish ballad Tam Lin. I actually have read a few Tam Lin retellings over the years (Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard, and Delia Sherman's short story "Cotillion"), however those were all years ago and I realized I don't really know anything about the original ballad. And from the very basic research I've already performed, it looks like there are tons of retellings out there, some from authors like Diana Wynne Jones and Holly Black. If you have any retelling suggestions, let me know! I can't wait to get started reading all things Tam Lin!

The event sign-up list is still open, so if you're interested head over here. A lot of the most well-known fairy tales and folktales have already been taken, but there really is an infinite amount of possibilities. If you're interested but not too familiar with many tales, let me know because I have tons of suggestions.