Fairest & The Princess Tales, both by Gail Carson Levine
Ella Enchanted is up there on my favourite books list, so I was really excited for Fairest. And as long as I ignored the totally annoying part of making a secondary character in Ella Enchanted the sister of the main character here (it didn’t add to anything, unlike reusing other characters, which did, and staying in the same world, which made lots of sense). This was, of course, a retelling of Snow White, which (a) is not my favourite fairy tale and (b) was already done so brilliantly by Neil Gaiman (Snow Glass Apples) that there is almost no point in ever reading another retelling. But this one was fine.
The Princess Tales are a collection of retold fairy tales as short stories. I was most fond of the princess and the pea, but most of them are good.
Helen of Troy / by Margaret George
So, The Autobiography of King Henry VIII is up there as one of my favourite books ever. Her other books have been ok (Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles), barely ok (Cleopatra), unreadable (Mary, called Magdalene — but she wanted to write about Judas and was told she couldn’t; her chapters on Judas were far and away the best parts of the book), so I was half excited, half trepidacious. I am a fan of Greek mythology, after all.
But in the end, this one won me over. I didn’t always like the people, but I don’t always like non-fictional people, either. And I liked how matter of factly the gods were invoked, rarely doing anything but appearing to people in dreams. I also liked — especially liked — the story of Helen and Menelaus’s life together, after Troy.
I do wonder, though — are there any modern tellings of this story which are not sympathetic primarily to Troy, and which don’t portray Achilles as a sociopath?
The secret river / by Kate Grenville.
I really, really liked this. A lot. About a convict and his family, in London and then sent to Australia. I don’t want to blog much about the main themes of the book, because it will ruin the ending, which, though not a huge shock, is still something you want to be surprised by.
Carry me down / by M.J. Hyland.
This was fine — about a boy who can detect lying, maybe, and his dysfunctional family and inability to understand other people or social interaction. He reminded me a bit of my sister, so it was difficult.