Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Fairytale Retellings I’ve Read and Want to Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Each week there is a new topic for bloggers to choose and list their top ten. It was a free pick this week so I chose a Top Ten Tuesday topic from a few months ago; Top Ten Fairytale Retellings I’ve Read and Want to Read.

Fairytale retellings are one of my favourite sub genres of young adult books I have already read so many and there are more being released this year, and that have already been released, that I plan to start soon. I was gutted to have missed this Top Ten Tuesday topic when it first came around so I really enjoyed getting a second chance at it and picking out my top ten fairytale retelling books.

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Top Fairytale Retelling Books I’ve Read

Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Retelling of Cinderella

Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that I have quite a few other books I wanted to highlight on this list I would have put the whole of The Lunar Chronicles series on here. Instead I’ll stick with Cinder; a Cinderella retelling set in New Beijing with a wicked step-mother, a handsome prince, and a grand ball alongside a Lunar Queen, a deadly plague, and cyborgs. Cinder is the first book in one of my favourite series, definitely pick this up if you haven’t already.

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Splintered by A.G. Howard
Retelling of Alice in Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is my all-time favourite fairytale, I don’t think I’ll ever find anything that beats it, so when a retelling comes along inspired by Alice in Wonderland it automatically goes on my to-read list. When I read the blurb for Splintered I knew it would be amazing. Alyssa travels to a Wonderland which has been badly damaged by the actions of one of her ancestors, the original Alice, and she has to put things right again; all the while dealing with the cunning and secretive Morpheus, and the treacherous Red Queen.

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Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
Retelling of Beauty and the Beast

This book is probably one of the darker and more beautifully written retellings of Beauty and the Beast that I have read. Nyx is a complex character, strong yet angry and smart yet bitter, she is incredibly well developed and I loved seeing her journey throughout the book. She was promised in marriage to a monster when she was born, and she has been training her whole life to kill him, but when she meets her new husband for the first time she instead finds herself strangely drawn to him.

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Never Never by Brianna Shrum
Retelling of Peter Pan

I haven’t read many Peter Pan retellings, I tried Tiger Lily but it ended up being one of my rare DNF books, but when I saw the blurb for Never Never I decided to give it try and I ended up loving this book. Instead of showing us more of Peter Pan and his Lost Boys, and the adventures they had, we saw Captain Hook’s story. How did he end up in Neverland in the first place? What was it that turned him from a Lost Boy into a fearsome pirate captain, and why did he hate Peter so much?

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The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh
Retelling of One Thousand and One Nights

One Thousand and One Nights is the only original fairy tale that I hadn’t read before starting a retelling of it. But even so I loved The Wrath and the Dawn; I found myself, like Khalid, enthralled by Shahrzad’s stories as she wove them each night to survive her husband’s wrath. Like Cruel Beauty this is a beautifully written story and I cannot wait for the second book in the duology, especially after the way The Wrath and the Dawn ended.

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Top Fairytale Retelling Books I Plan to Read

Heartless by Marissa Meyer
Retelling of Alice in Wonderland

Anything Marissa Meyer writes is sure to be amazing, and the fact that Heartless is an Alice in Wonderland retelling means it’s gone right to the top of my to-read list for when it’s released. Why does November have to be so far away?

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A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
Retelling of Beauty and the Beast

I haven’t read any of Sarah J. Maas’s books before but I have heard great things about A Court of Thorns and Roses, and all her stories actually. Everyone seems really excited for the release of the second book in this series so I may have to read A Court of Thorns and Roses before it’s released.

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The Shadow Queen by C.J. Redwine
Retelling of Snow White

This is another of my eagerly anticipated 2016 releases. There are already a lot of Snow White retellings out there but this one seems like it sticks close to the original tale with a few small differences; a princess with magic and a dragon huntsman among others. I haven’t read any of C.J. Redwine’s other books but this one sounds amazing.

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Unhooked by Lisa Maxwell
Retelling of Peter Pan

After Never Never I decided to give Peter Pan retellings another chance. I’m probably not going to start Tiger Lily again but Unhooked sounds amazing. It’s not so much a retelling of the original story through another character’s eyes but a new story all together that reinvents Neverland, Peter Pan and Captain Hook.

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Spinning Starlight by R.C. Lewis
Retelling of The Wild Swans

So while this book has mixed reviews on Goodreads I haven’t actually come across any other stories that use The Wild Swans as inspiration. I used to love this story as a child (I had a massive book of fairytales that I would read all the time and The Wild Swans was one of them) so to have a full length novel of the same fairy tale is obviously going to be worth the read.

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So what do you think? Did you take part in this week’s Top Ten Tuesday, if so let me know what some of your favourite fairytale retelling books are or what you picked for this week’s free-for-all.