Archive for August, 2016

Diehard Hans Christian Andersen fans might have noticed that we tweaked the ending of our latest issue’s Favourite Fairy Tale, The Little Mermaid (Storytime 24). It pains me to fiddle with classics too much and I’m always wary of being disrespectful to the original author, so you’ll find our amendments nowhere near as extreme as Disney’s.

The Disneyfication of Fairy Tales

However, it’s partly because of Disney (and a whole host of priggish Victorian editors) that I felt the need to do any amends at all. Disney transformed the tragic (and religious) ending of The Little Mermaid, giving the audience a mermaid-marries-prince love story. And when Disney did away with this story’s unhappily every after (and the darker elements of many other famous fairy tales), they fundamentally changed the public’s expectation of these stories. Fairy tales became synonymous with happy endings. The princess finds her prince, the hero wins his prize and the bad guys get their just desserts.

The End of Unhappily Ever Afters

Over time, unhappily ever afters, darkness and peril have been edited out and watered down to make fairy tales more palatable to young readers. Given that a (slightly silly) 2012 survey found that parents don’t read many classic fairy tales to their kids because they consider them too scary, we don’t think it’s our place to ruffle feathers. We want to encourage reading for joy not nightmares.

In fact, when we surveyed potential readers before we launched our magazine, fairy tales were the top request. When we questioned that further, readers wanted the classic fairy tales that everyone knows and loves – not the darker, original versions, which have been lost in time. In short, our readers aren’t into unhappily ever afters. Hence fiddling with The Little Mermaid to make the ending a little more balanced and appealing.

5 Dark Fairy Tales

However, in the spirit of being fair to Mr Andersen and other fairy tale creators, I’ve gathered some of the most interesting unhappily ever afters. These endings haven’t made it into Storytime – given that our readers are aged 3 to 8, you should be able to see why…

1. The Little Mermaid (Storytime Issue 24) Having given up her life under the sea to win the heart of her prince, the Little Mermaid endures crippling pain. She walks on feet that “felt as if treading upon the points of needles or sharp knives”. Then she is struck dumb and unable to communicate with her one true love, and sees him marry the woman who wrongfully takes credit for saving his life. To add insult to injury, rather than stabbing her prince to save herself, she is doomed to spend 300 years as an ethereal “daughter of the air” before she can go to heaven.

2. Rumpelstiltskin (Storytime Issue 11) In truth, this is a fairly creepy story, though we strived to put a nicer and funnier version in Storytime. First, a father lies and gets the star of the story into a pickle, then the king is hideously greedy and forces her to marry him. To top it all, a weird little man wants to take away her child. In the conclusion, Rumpelstiltskin is so agitated when she guesses his name, he tears his body in half before smashing through the floor and going, presumably, to hell. Pretty grim (or Grimm?).

3. Cinderella (Storytime Issue 3) There are many versions of this classic rags-to-riches fairy tale all over the world, but one of the best-known ‘originals’ by Grimm is unexpectedly gruesome. In it, the two ugly sisters – desperate to squeeze their feet into the slipper – use a knife to slice off parts of their own feet (a toe and a heel). The game is up when the prince spots blood streaming from the shoe. There’s even a version where birds peck out the sisters’ eyes at the end. Eek.

The Wicked Queen gets what she deserves in Snow White. Art by Flavia Sorrentino.

4. Snow White (Storytime Issue 16) The wicked queen is truly horrid in the Grimm version of this family favourite. However, she does pay the harshest penalty. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to include the scene where she eats Snow White’s lungs and liver for dinner (or rather animal organs the huntsman brings to her after letting Snow White escape). And we also tweaked the ending – you’ll see why. When the wicked queen attends Snow White’s wedding to the prince, she is forced to wear a pair of red-hot iron shoes, heated by burning coals. She dies an agonised death dancing around with scalded feet.

5. The Frog Prince (Storytime Issue 21) Inspired by this fairy tale, the saying goes that you have to kiss a few frogs before you find your prince. It’s just as well that this is the version that became mainstream. In older tellings, the prince regained his true form either by being thrown against the wall or having his head chopped off. Understandably, for our age group, we stuck with the puckering up version!

Seeing how fairy tales have evolved over the years and reading the many versions that exist is one of the most interesting parts of our work. But making a call on how true we stay to originals and what to tweak for our readership is a challenge.

When we remove the truly gruesome bits, it’s not about molly-coddling, it’s more about fulfilling expectations. The truth is unhappily ever afters and gratuitous gore might have been the rage in the Grimm era, but right now, most people are after a happy ending – and that can’t just be down to Disney.

So apologies to Hans Christian Andersen, but we’ll stick with our slightly sweetened versions from now on. Do you agree? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook. We’re always interested to hear your views.

Here’s to reading happily ever after anyway…

(Storytime Ed.)

Another month whizzes by and our new super-summery issue of Storytime 24 is out now! It comes with all the stories our readers know and love, but with an extra sprinkling of sunshine – because we all know that we can’t rely on the weather to do that.

For this blog, we thought we’d celebrate Issue 24 and give you a little overview and insight into the stories we selected and their illustrators.

<h3>Inside Storytime Issue 24</h3>

Our latest issue kicks off with Ukrainian illustrator Zhanna Mendel’s quirky and vibrant artwork for our Famous Fable. She gave it a fresh new approach and we gave it a new title: The Crab Walk. Fables were one of the great surprises of Storytime. I didn’t enjoy them much as a child – a bit too preachy. However, reworking them has been a really enjoyable aspect of the magazine.

We love what Zhanna did with the characters in this. All the traditional fables from Aesop and beyond deserve a good old dusting off and some shiny new artwork.

A Feast of Cobwebs was also a great find and I’ve been waiting for the right moment to fit it in – the moment when we needed a wacky Italian cautionary tale about neglecting your housework! Paco Sordo’s artwork is brilliant and the opening picture with a greedy cat and dog makes us smile every time we see it.

The Little Mermaid is this issue’s Favourite Fairy Tale. I find the original story by Hans Christian Andersen a little troublesome as far as role models are concerned, so our version has been adapted. I’ll write more about that another time. That aside, Martuka gave us some stunning illustrations for this and the gorgeous sunshiny colour palette we hoped for, as you can see above.

Still on the summer theme, we included an edited version of Thomas Hood’s In the Summer, illustrated by the brilliant Kate Alizadeh, whose style is refreshingly unique. She has created a succession of the cutest animals ever seen, including monkeys playing violins, a lion in pyjamas and a fox in hollyhocks. A real treat.

We’ve also got our first Hercules adventure (illustrated by Ricardo Fernandez), which sees a brawny Hercules take on the Nemean Lion. There;s great humour in the image on the final spread, when the terrified king crawls into a vase to hide – and it has a very graphic, modern approach for a Greek myth.

Francesco Zito’s artwork for our folk tale, Not-So-Silly Sam, on the other hand, is colourful and more classic in style. Traditional and charming, without being old-fashioned. It’s the perfect fit for the story. The enchanted lemon in this story is bonkers, but we like it that way.

Finally, our Brilliant Book extract, What Katy Did. Why doesn’t this book get more attention? Katy is one of life’s great dreamers, an accidental rebel and a hoot. Susan Coolidge’s treatment of the characters is so entertaining, and her depiction of childhood is pure magic. We have illustrations to match from Marco Guadalupi!

I hope I’ve tempted you to get hold of this issue – or even subscribe. We try to squeeze as much story magic as we can into every issue and, if you like this one, you’ll LOVE our 2nd anniversary issue, which is hot on its heels in September. A world of adventure and imagination lies ahead – for those who are smart enough to join the fun!

Enjoy and more soon!

Next time you hear the cry, “I’m bored”, or are stuck in on a rainy afternoon, here’s something you can try that will save the day, and will hopefully find enormous fun. Be a story explorer and your kids will love you for it.

Those in the know (like clever teachers, librarians, artists, crafters and storytellers) also use the story exploring technique to squeeze in some stealth learning. You’ll soon understand why. So what exactly is the secret art of story exploring?

Put simply, it’s reading a story and then spending time afterwards exploring that story in more detail through engaging and enjoyable activities. Those activities can be a wide range of things and work best when they’re inspired by the content of one specific story. Here are some examples for you:

How to Be a Story Explorer: 4 Fun Things to Try

1. Baking
So many stories involve food that it’s easy to find one in our Storytime back issues to inspire a baking session. Why not read The Gingerbread Man in Storytime Issue 2 and use our recipe to bake your own edible runaway? Or bake the King’s Chocolate Cake from our Mouse Deer and Tiger story in Storytime Issue 22? You could also rustle up a ‘Drink Me’ bottle with something delicious to sip, inspired by Alice in Wonderland. As you add the ingredients and enjoy your homemade goodies, talk about the story and the role food or drink played in it. Imagine you’re the characters eating it. What does it taste like? What do the characters think or say about it? Act out parts of the story using the food you’ve made as props.

2. Small World
Creating scenes from a story in miniature is a great way to use any plastic and cuddly toys you have to hand, and you can use old cardboard boxes, paper and crayons or paint to recreate rooms or scenery from the story, enabling you to get really arty. Take over a whole table to do it. In schools, it’s called small world play, and there are some great examples on Pinterest. When it’s done, you can re-enact scenes (great for showing understanding of characters and storyline), and also use your imagination to make up new scenes, new endings or act out what happened when the story finished. Try it with our Fantastic Fox story from Storytime Issue 23.

3. Acting
Putting on a performance of a story you’ve read or simply roleplaying it with each other isn’t just fun, it’s a really effective way of understanding how stories work and why characters behave the way they do. You can even change key parts of the story and see what happens next. There are no rules in story exploring. Go the whole hog and dress up in costume. Alternatively, you could print off our free downloadable character masks (try The Frog Prince from Storytime Issue 21). Or use readymade puppets or finger puppets and do a puppet show. You could even just wear a sticker with the character’s name on it – whatever works best for you.

4. Crafting
Story-inspired crafts don’t have to be complicated. There are plenty of simple paper crafts you can do with kids, and each story sparks a different idea. In every issue of Storytime, we put in a quick craft that adults and kids can do together – from origami fox bookmarks for Issue 23 to a Hiawatha headdress in Issue 18. But you don’t have to follow our crafts. Just read a story and see what inspires you. For example, you could make gorgeous glittery dream jars, inspired by Roald Dahl’s The BFG in our latest issue. Or a wig of golden hair (using crepe paper), inspired by our Sif’s Golden Hair myth. Using your crafts to act out the story or to make small world scenes helps story exploring go even further.

There are other ways to explore stories, of course. You can complete story-inspired puzzles and games together. It’s one of the reasons we put Storytime Playbox in the back of every issue. Why not make amazing maps of the locations in your story or keep a scrapbook of the hero or heroine’s adventure? You can take a trip to the library and explore other stories with the same subject, genre or author. Or you can write alternative endings, character diaries, stories told from other perspectives – and invent whole new characters or follow-up stories.

The main thing is to delve deep into the story. Let it fire up your imagination, leave no opportunity for creativity unturned and squeeze every last drop of fun out of it. THAT is how to be a story explorer!

Give it a go! It’s a really rewarding way to spend time with little ones, especially over the holidays – and a great way to use your Storytime magazines.

Until next time, explorers…