Welcome to our Fairy tale Adaptations book club! This go round we’ve selected four books that showed their author’s take on various fairy tales and folktales. Each of our books have their own Discussion Posts and don’t forget, we’ll be having our Zoom Book Club on Saturday September 18 at 7 pm EDT.
Other Discussions
- The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
- Deerskin by Robin McKinley
- Sea Witch by Sarah Henning
- Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson
For those of you returning or who might be joining in for #CannonBookClub for the first time (hello new friends!) all are welcome, you don’t have to be registered for CBR13. The topics are numbered, and we ask that you refer to them below by that number to help people find the conversations they are looking for. If you are responding to someone else’s thoughts, please try to reply directly to them.
We will also be talking on our Social Media platforms, and of course in our Facebook group, Cannonball Read Book Chat, we’ll have some additional prompts so please join us there as well. Now, on to the questions!
- Do you think there ‘s any special power in taking a known story and envisioning it in a new way?
- Do villains deserve a back story? How did this story compare to others such as The Joker and Maleficent?
- Consider how Sea Witch and The Little Mermaid handle feminist ideas; are either successful?
- Were you interested in the characters added to Sea Witch that weren’t in Andersen’s The Little Mermaid?
- What did you think of the structure of the book as a storytelling device? Were the flashbacks effective?
- How would you update the story of The Little Mermaid for a modern audience?
- How does either version, source material or adaptation, compare to the animated movie?
- Deep dive: What do you think of the depiction of law and/or morality in the animated movie? For more information on the topic see “Ahead of the Lawmen”: Law and Morality in Disney Animated Films 1960–1998” by Laura Beth Nielsen
