I really wasn’t expecting to finish this challenge so soon. It just happened that several appropriate myth/folklore/fairy tale reads fell into my lap. It worked out really well, because all the books were very different from each other, while still fitting the theme.

Widdershins by Charles de Lint was a perfect book to start with. Written by the man who is apparently the pioneer of the urban fantasy genre, and set in a North American city of his own creation, it includes a lot of Native American/Canadian myth that was almost entirely new to me. (Interestingly, to me Newford seemed like an American city, although it’s never stated—and when I checked on Wikipedia, I found that apparently Canadians tend to see it as American, while Americans assume it’s Canadian! It makes me wonder what cues we’re each picking up that say “American” or “Canadian” to us.)

Agatha Christie’s The Complete Quin & Satterthwaite wasn’t an obvious choice for inclusion into the challenge, but the folklore surrounding the Harlequin has always fascinated me. This book was a re-read, but the character of Mr. Quin was no less magical for that!

Robin McKinley’s re-telling of Beauty and the Beast in Beauty was interesting, bringing the characters to life. It’s not my favourite fairy tale re-telling, but for that matter, the original story isn’t exactly one of my favourite fairy tales. Beauty is a kids’ book and basically fluff, but fun, romantic fluff, so I enjoyed reading it.

Ironside is pretty much as far as you can get from Beauty and still be a romantic fairy tale. Holly Black’s Modern Faerie Tales are much darker in ambiance than most young adult fantasy, but that’s part of what makes them so original. Plus, unlike, say, Laurell K. Hamilton, she knows that takes more than long hair, rampant violence, and looser sexual mores to make faerie society feel truly alien.

Sorcery & Cecelia is a more traditional fantasy novel, except that it’s also an epistolary mystery set in Regency England. There was also the touch of the gothic about it, which I liked a great deal.

I enjoyed all five books I read for this challenge, and I’d recommend them all, although Widdershins, Ironside, and Sorcery & Cecelia were without question the best. I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream too recently to re-read it in June, but maybe I’ll watch the movie on Midsummer’s Eve!

Thanks, Carl, for hosting this challenge—I had a blast!

Oh, and I fulfilled my requirement for the Chunkster Challenge, but it runs all year, so I’m upping my goal from 4 chunksters to 12.

Tags: Once Upon a Time II