I've always liked modern fairy tales, or even the darker ones that make one squirm in their seat. I grew up reading the real fairy tales, the real versions by the Brothers Grimm. It was my mother's fault, of course, that I had nightmares after I read them.
"You can read regular books, Shira," she would say. "You don't have to scare yourself silly."
"But Mom," I would say, "those other fairy tales are for wusses."
Later in life (actually, only about two years later in the fourth grade), I began reading Rita Mae and Sneaky Pie Brown's morbid mysteries, my first venture into the oh-so forbidden into the "Grown up" section of the library upstairs from the safe books in the basement.
My future employers were amused.
Now that I actually work at the library, I don't have much time to read. However, I picked up A Kiss in Time today by Alex Flinn. This retelling of the classic fairy tale of "Sleeping Beauty" has so far been a wonderful read. It places the reader into the oh-so awkward situation of Talia, a princess who pricked her finger on a spindle on her sixteenth birthday, despite her country's ban on the said item. Enter the modern day, and we have Jack, a teenager who tours Europe with his distracted friend, Travis, at his parents' bequest.
I recommend this book fully. I'm about halfway through it already and it promises to not be a let down, even if it is a teen romance. Not like say...coughTwilightcough...
And so it goes ... remember that while you find plenty of value in the genre you so eloquently describe here, others find value in Twilight, etc... it's about the connection(s) we as individuals make with some aspect of a piece of writing ... As an author (kind of cool to be able to say that now:) I recently received a note from an old colleague whose connection to my novel is like nothing I would have expected. She related to the book as a person of extreme spiritual faith; it's the aspect of the book that kept her turning the pages. Kind of cool, really.
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