Our childrens' book specialist Holly Harper blogs about fairytales in YA literature and a new collection of fairytale retellings edited by Isobelle Carmody.

When I was young my all-time favourite film was the Disney version of The Little Mermaid. I dragged my poor mum to see it at the movies over and over again. The fairytale with a heroine who rises from the depths to find her true love and ends up happily ever after absolutely enchanted me.

When I finally read the original Hans Christian Andersen version many years later, I was horrified. How could she not end up with her true love? Where was the happy ending? But after the initial shock wore off, I was intrigued to find that not all fairytales ended well. So I started reading up on the original fairytales, the ones with Bluebeard’s murdered wives behind the locked door, and the Little Matchstick Girl frozen to death. They were dark, sure, but that somehow made them all the more real and a lot more interesting.

The thing I love most about young adult lit is that it encompasses all kinds of genres, and fairytales are no exception. It plucks these tales of happily ever after and reshapes them into stories we can actually relate to. One of the latest offerings is Tales From the Tower Volume 1: The Wilful Eye, a collection of short stories edited by Isobelle Carmody and Nan McNab.

The Wilful Eye retells those fairy tales that we all know and love: Rumplestiltskin, The Snow Queen, Beauty and the Beast and others, and it’s done so by brilliant fantasy writers such as Margo Lanagan and Richard Harland. These tales are dark and enchanting, and will make you think in completely different ways about the stories you thought you knew so well.

There are many of these modern fairytales that take real life and twist it around, injecting it with magic and mystery. Brigid Lowry’s Triple Ripple intertwines three tales: that of the reader, the writer, and the girl in the fairytale. Beastly by Alex Flinn is a modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast where the rich and conceited Kyle Kingston becomes disfigured for his selfish actions. Then there is the captivatingly dark retelling of Cinderella in Malinda Lo's Ash, which sees the eponymous heroine falling for a mysterious huntress.

Or, for those who prefer their myths and tales with plenty of action and thrills, there are the epic battle scenes in Frank Beddor’s Looking Glass Wars which plays off the story of Alice in Wonderland, and the modern reimagining of Greek myths in the Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan.

It’s easy to think that fairytales are things that you used to read when you were little, but don’t have much time for any more. In Isobelle Carmody’s introduction to The Wilful Eye, she laments that “Fairytales are considered to be children’s stories, when in fact they are ancient stories passed on to children because the adult world no longer sees them as relevant or interesting.” But read any one of these stories and you’ll see just how relevant and interesting they are. They take away the happy endings, show us new sides to characters we’d never imagined, or change the story completely. They take the tales that we’ve heard time and time again, and they make them new and enchanting once more.