Neon’s A Doll A Day… Again (2020)

[neon_jellyfish]

Love the pictures of the dolls with the book, especially Briar.
There are some fairly good retellings of the fairytales that don’t sanitise or sugar coat things. I’m currently rereading Jim Hines Princess series, where he mainly deals with what happened to Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty (her name is Talia in the books) following the ‘happily ever after’. He also deals with the Little Mermaid, Red Riding Hood and the Snow Queen. Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber was a fantastic quite visceral look at the old stories. Being from Eastern Europe you may also like Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and Spinning Silver, which take a new look at some of the old stories, but with an Eastern European slant.

Thank you!
Bloody Chamber sounds like something I should check out! I'm not sure about Eastern European slants by western authors, they tend to be kinda bad, but Naomi Novik is a big name, so I'll check them out. Someday. Mt Toberead is roughly the size of two Everests right now...

Edit after your edit: yes, that's the book and Chris Riddell is indeed the illustrator, I love his work.

I have that one, it’s beautiful.  He’s a great illustrator / artist.

Maybe that’s a photo idea I / Elfy could do in winter.  Get out some of our illustrated books & taken dolly photos with them.
I’ve got a lovely illustrated Alice that I could use to start with.

Do it!!! I like books and matching dolls, it would be great to see yours!

RE: the relative tameness of fairy tales now compared to back then.

Well, that's the Victorian Era you have to thank for that, really. They turned fairy tales from lessons that might not necessarily be nice but were nonetheless important, to moral dictators. The irony of it all is that these tamer versions became more popular than some of their grimmer counterparts. (Though in the case of Cinderella at least, the softer version is older than the grimmer one.)

...This is really a topic for the Little Chit-Chat in the Library thread...

Also? Just wanna say again it's a lovely picture

Victorians were crazy in more way than one. Victorian era was definitely the biggest case, but it was happening before and also after 19th century. Sadly, there's little actual evidence, because the old Slavs flippin' never wrote anything down (I'm very angry with my ancestors for this), but some later chroniclers wrote some of the stories down, and each newer version was more and more deformed to fit Christian worldview, demonizing the original religion. Another example would be communism.

And thank you!


Day 58

One more suitably dark fairytale!