A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth and Folk Tales In Fiction - X is For EXtras!

 Let’s face it, X is always a difficult letter to come up with a post for - I think I only managed it once, for Greek mythology - X Is For Xanthus and Balius(Achilles’ horses). 

So, this post will cheat a bit and I’m using it for writing about a few books that didn’t quite fit into any of the other posts.

Here they are.

The Time Of The Ghosts by Aussie writer Gillian Polack is set in Canberra, Australia’s capital city. The main characters are three older women, Ann, Lil and Mabel, who enjoy each other’s company and dinner parties. 

One of them is dating the ghost of a bushranger. Another of them is actually mediaeval water fae Melusine, who has allowed herself to age so she doesn’t have to keep moving on. There are flashbacks to her memories of other times and places.

Melusine, in case you don’t know about her, is a folklore character who met Raymond of Poitou and agreed to marry him on condition he never tried to see her on a Saturday. They had ten sons and she built him fabulous castles, but like other men of this kind of fairy tale, he just had to take a peek eventually, didn’t he? He was shocked to see his wife sitting in the bath as a snake from the waist down, so she had to leave him. Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s Queen, was supposed to be descended from Raymond and Melusine, which would make her an ancestor of the British royal family. Just saying. 

In the novel, she has also participated in the story of Bisclavret, a story written by Marie De France(if you want a YA novel based on that story, check out my novel Wolfborn, available in ebook, or print on demand.) Oh, and she long ago converted to Judaism. Gillian Polack does a lot of fiction with Jewish characters and themes. 

It’s my favourite of her novels and is available in ebook, both Kindle and Apple Books.

Sophie Masson, who wrote a version of Cinderella, Moonlight And Ashes, mentioned in an earlier post, has also done a novel about Snow White, set in the same universe as Moonlight And Ashes. 

This novel, Hunter’s Moon, is also set in the 19th century. Her heroine is called Bianca, daughter of the owner of a department store chain, who is known as “the king of elegance”, rather than a regular king. Her stepmother is the beautiful, elegant Belladonna, whom Bianca admires greatly till Belladonna tries to kill her. The Mirror is a newspaper! When it declares Bianca the fairest instead of her stepmother, Belladonna is not impressed… 

If you like fairy tale retellings, this author is worth checking out, as she has done several.

Melissa Marr is the author of the YA Wicked Lovely series of urban fantasies. In this series, punk fairies hang around the city streets and are tattooed as part of their culture. (The author said it was because she liked tattoos, but it works) There is rivalry between the Summer and Winter courts. It has a lot of Celtic folklore elements in it, including Beira the winter queen, who is a part of Scottish myth and legend. Melissa Marr is a PhD in this area and her bibliography includes a number of books I used to research Wolfborn.

I have just started reading Juliet Marillier’s YA novel Wildwood Dancing, which is the Grimm fairy tale  of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” set in Transylvania. The sisters are the daughters of a wealthy merchant. I’m enjoying it so far. Juliet Marillier is a wonderful interpreter of fairy tales and I recommend anything she writes.

I also recommend anything edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow, who have done several amazing fairy tale anthologies, which feature well known authors. They are prolific writers themselves, but best known for their editing of fantasy fiction. 

Tomorrow: Y Is For Jane Yolen