The Brainstorm Plus: Brainstorm 221: Six Swans Fairytale Rewrites

Today I’ve got a lesser known fairytale and its rewrites for you. Ever heard of the Grimms’ “Six Swans” tale? How about its later version by Andersen as “The Wild Swans”? Basically, the story involves multiple siblings and all but one is magically transformed into an animal of some kind by an evil antagonist and the one sibling remaining human must find a way to break the spell and transform them back to human. If you want to read more on the history and evolution of the tale, I recommend SurLaLuneFairytales.com which is a well-researched site that dives deep to find the origins of different fairytales and how they developed. Here is their Six Swans history page. If you like stories about siblings to the rescue, you might want to check out these three books which are rewrites of the tale. Click on the book title for my full review.

The Extra-Ordinary Princess by Carolyn Q. Ebbitt

Amelia is the fourth princess of Gossling. She's convinced she'll never be as good at anything as her three older sisters are. She feels super plain and ordinary. But when a plague sweeps across the land, her parents die working for their people, and eldest princess Merrill is still a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday. The law dictates the closest male relative will rule in the interim, which unfortunately is Count Raven. Raven has been waiting to get his clutches on the throne and he's not about to leave any time soon if he can help it. Soon, thanks to Count Raven's manouverings, the fate of the kingdom and her sisters rests on Amelia's shoulders. It's overwhelming, and Amelia doesn't feel up to the task. What can an ordinary princess do?

Target Readers:
Fantasy Fans, Adventure Story Fans, Fairytale Rewrite Fans, Readers Who Feel Painfully Ordinary, Middle Grade Readers

The Princess of the Wild Swans by Diane Zahler

Princess Meriel gets the shock of her life when her father returns from a trip with a new wife. It might not be a bad thing, but Lady Orianna gives Meriel the creeps. Just days after her arrival, she announces that all five of Meriel's older brothers have been sent off to school, yes, even the ones too old for school. Meriel is convinced she's done something terrible to them instead, and a walk by the pond confirms her worst fears. For there are five new swans on the lake, each with human eyes the color of her brothers'. Meriel doesn't know how to fight a witch, but the good news for her is that Prince Cullan's girlfriend Riona and her brother Liam are both half witch and do know how to undo the spell. But it means days and days of hard toil that most spoiled princesses wouldn't dream of trying. Meriel loves her brothers too much to give up, and it's a good thing she doesn't because the whole kingdom is in danger from the witch's schemes.

Target Readers:
Fantasy Fans, Fairytale Rewrite Fans, Middle Grade Readers

Spinning Starlight by R.C. Lewis

Welcome to Sampati. One of the seven planets that form the Seven Points in which the planets all work together to form a society. Transport between them used to rely on things called portals which were temperamental and painful. Thanks to the brilliant Jantzen family, though, much less painful and more reliable conduits are now used to travel between planets. But the Jantzen brothers recently noticed that the conduits were starting to destabilize and quietly began researching a way to fix them. This didn't much concern Liddi Jantzen, their younger sister, until a bunch of armed guys arrived at the family estate. She evaded the strange men and made her way to town only to find out the men were henchmen for Ms. Minali, who currently runs JTI, the Jantzen tech company Liddi is set to inherit once she comes of age. Ms. Minali has decided she knows how to fix the conduits, and it requires a biological to be inside. She's trapped all eight of Liddi's brothers in the conduits and is determined she can fix things in the next month or so. Liddi and the fact that she knows what is going on is obviously in the way of a quiet fix, so Minali installs a mechanism in her voicebox making the smallest squeak from Liddi set off an explosion that will kill her brothers. With her brothers trapped and parents dead, Liddi has no one else on the planet she can trust. Sure she has loads of "friends" as one of the richest and most followed celebrities on the planet, but Liddi is not blind to why these people hang around her. Her brothers eventually discover that in moonlight they can appear to Liddi, and they help her escape from Sampati via a portal. Liddi expects to find herself on one of the other Seven Points when she recovers from her uncomfortable journey, but it is a planet she doesn't recognize. To further complicate things, Sampati no longer has a written language, so between her inability to talk and unfamiliarity with writing or reading, it is going to be really hard for Liddi to find ways to convey what is going on and figure out how to help save her brothers.