Storybook favorites: Wonder Women, The Stolen Child, Don Quixote

Medusa. (Image by Lucky Lynda via flickr)

Wonder Women: Mythical Greek Women and Feminism

This one is by far my favorite Storybook. I absolutely love it when writers and artists take a well-known legend or fairy tale and turn it on its head, with the villain becoming the protagonist—check out the StarKid musical "Twisted" for another great example, as well as the Disney movie Maleficent. With examples like these, I think they're not only fascinating but also important because there's a lot of value in telling a popular, widespread story from different perspectives. Even in real-life history, a complicated, consequential event will always be interpreted in various ways by different people. For example, fifty people could fight in the same battle and come out of it with vastly different ideas of what exactly happened during the battle—which side won (if any), why did the battle matter, and who started the conflict in the first place?

In my freshman year history class at OU, I remember learning that history is generally told by the "winners," whether that means winning an actual battle/war or simply being a powerful, privileged member of society: someone with money, class status, etc., who has the power to tell their story to the masses and have everyone believe and support them. This is exactly the opposite of what happened to women in Greek mythology, like Medusa, when the men who harmed them silenced them and told their stories incorrectly, according to the story told in the Wonder Women Storybook. I love how the writer reframed the narrative to give Medusa and the others more agency and justice.

Poseidon was kind of the worst (well, really, all of the gods were horrible—don't get me started on Zeus). (Image by Daniels Joffe via unsplash)

Parental Pursuit: The Stolen Child's Perspective

Growing up, "Rapunzel" was one of my favorite stories, although the sweet, happy Barbie movie was the version I knew, rather than the somber one that was simply based on a child's abduction and had no happy ending. Nonetheless, I've always found scary fairy tales like "Rumpelstiltskin" and "Hansel & Gretel" fascinating, and I love how this Storybook combines several tales (and undersea creatures!) to create a bigger-picture narrative that plays with the concept of changelings, too.


Breaking News! Don Quixote: A Hero?

I initially listed a different Storybook as my third-favorite choice, but I've changed my mind upon further reflection. This Storybook is especially neat to me because Spanish is one of my majors (creative writing is my other major, so that also makes this project extremely in my wheelhouse). As a Spanish major in my fourth year at OU, I've experienced time and time again what it's like to read complicated works of literature in a foreign language, and I love how this Storybook does a good job of synthesizing the source material and making it more fun to read by telling it in the form of a screenplay, through the characters of two news anchors.