Here are 100 books that Love in Color fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a queer reader and writer of horror, I have little interest in anything that could be deemed “positive representation.” Horror is most compelling when it gets honest and ugly about the bad, selfish, cruel, or simply unwise choices people make when they’re truly scared–and that includes queer people. I love queer stories that aren’t primarily romantic or neatly resolved. I like messy groups of friends, toxic emotional entanglements, and family dynamics that don’t fit in a Hallmark card. These days there are lots of stories in other genres about queer people becoming their best selves, but horror also has space for us at our worst.
In choosing a theme for this list, I was very careful to think of one that would allow me to include this book, my favorite haunted house novel of all time. It’s gay; it’s weird; its central mystery is never fully resolved, which may be why it’s stuck with me for years and is one of the few novels I’ve reread more than twice as an adult.
Miranda Silver is neither a classic Gothic heroine nor an ass-kicking Sidney Prescott type, but someone stranger and more opaque. She’s confused and lonely and an unreliable narrator. Her romance with classmate Ore might offer some respite from the terrors of her family’s ancestral home, but it’s not enough to save her.
I love a queer story without a happily ever after. Knowing who you are and who you love doesn’t always make everything turn out okay. Sometimes, it just means you have…
Haunting in every sense, White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi is a spine-tingling tribute to the power of magic, myth and memory.
High on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the loss of Lily, mother of twins Eliot and Miranda, and beloved wife of Luc. Miranda misses her with particular intensity. Their mazy, capricious house belonged to her mother's ancestors, and to Miranda, newly attuned to spirits, newly hungry for chalk, it seems they have never left. Forcing apples to grow in winter, revealing and concealing secret floors, the house is fiercely possessive of young…
I was six years old, and already a lover of Hallowe’en, when the special joy of stories took hold of my mind. It has never left. By the time I was an adult, I had come to value finely crafted fiction, the beautiful nuances of thought and expression possible in the hands of the greatest writers. At the same time, I never lost my youthful enthusiasm for the ghost, the deep forest just at twilight, the unused room at the back of the house where no one goes. To my delight, I have found there is an entire tradition of such work—gothic shapes rendered by the highest quality writers.
I am a huge fan of the very-brief gothic. It’s so hard to do well; trivial jump-scares are easy, but to produce a meaningful effect in only a few pages takes real precision. Shirley Jackson holds the crown with "The Lottery," but my second favorite instance of a surprisingly quick read that produces a real gasp is Angela Carter’s mini-treasure, "The Werewolf."
It manages to be a fairy tale, feminist critique, a witch, and a werewolf story all at once—and, like the beast in the title, it may not be what it appears. Also wonderful to me are "The Company of Wolves," "The Snow Child,"and the eponymous "The Bloody Chamber," that one a revisioning of "Bluebeard"—essentially, Carter updates all kinds of dark fairy tales, bringing out their subversive shadows for a savvy reader. Still so fresh to this day.
With an introduction by Helen Simpson. From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.
Long before I became a “fairy tale scholar,” I was keenly aware of the ways that fairy tales saturate our cultural landscape. Given their ubiquity, who isn’t? But my awareness was always a discomfiting one, an unnerving at the fairy tale’s insistent cheeriness; it was this unnerving that made me fall deeply in love with The Bloody Chamber, the collection that so beautifully flays the fairy tale to reveal its dark and sordid heart. In researching The Bloody Chamber, I saw ever more clearly that the fairy tale’s grim underbelly involves not only twisted ideas about gender and desire and love but also about race, and this discovery has motivated my research over the past decade.
Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox is a complex, enthralling pastiche of a novel. Interweaving adaptations of Bluebeard, Fitcher’s Bird, Mr. Fox, and the ballad of Reynardine, Mr. Foxinvites readers into a vertiginous wonderland where Oyeyemi’s adaptations interrogate the workings of gender and race, romance and desire, imperialism and geopolitics. Moving slipstream-style across the twentieth century, Mr. Fox offers a transnational circuit of stories and characters that connect gendered and raced cultural conventions with the misogyny and violence of the Bluebeard tradition, ultimately challenging readers to consider (and reconsider) European literary and artistic traditions as well as their underlying ideological structures.
Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction One of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists
From the prizewinning young writer of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Gingerbread, and Peaces comes a brilliant and inventive story of love, lies, and inspiration.
Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding, and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, the celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins…
My life quest has been to find true magic. Once believing it could only be uncovered in ruins or cathedrals continents away, I ended up discovering it in my own backyard under the Big Sky. When I was young, I read everything science fiction and fantasy to feel like that magic was real and bask in worlds far different from my own. Now, as a professional editor and author based in the West… I still read everything science fiction and fantasy, but now I get paid to do it.
I read this when my son was born, looking for a familiar story in more ways than one. This imported classic European fairy tale has our gunslinging Snow White escaping to the wild west and feels like a new comfort fable… if replacing dark twisted forests for a wind-whipped big sky can be comforting. It’s a story that doesn’t know how to end, or even if it should end—making it another facet to join numerous retellings. The Huntsman becomes a Pinkerton, the dwarves now a band of women on the run, and the Prince a melancholy expression of America’s history where many have no voice. It’s a bit cerebral and reveals heart-wrenching lessons when reflected on current times. Which, I suppose, is the purpose of a fable, right?
A New York Times bestselling author offers a brilliant reinvention of one of the best-known fairy tales of all time with Snow White as a gunslinger in the mythical Wild West.
Forget the dark, enchanted forest. Picture instead a masterfully evoked Old West where you are more likely to find coyotes as the seven dwarves. Insert into this scene a plain-spoken, appealing narrator who relates the history of our heroine’s parents—a Nevada silver baron who forced the Crow people to give up one of their most beautiful daughters, Gun That Sings, in marriage to him. Although her mother’s life ended…
Reading with your kid can be a delight, but it’s tough to find a book that both grown-up and child think is hysterical. I mean, I tried reading Catch-22 to my three-year-old, but for some reason the incisive social commentary just didn’t resonate with her. My kids and I both let out genuine chuckles and guffaws while reading all of these books—an experience that I treasured. These books are all giggly, snickery proof that you don’t have to dumb things down to appeal to a wide age range—a goal that I aim for myself in the children’s books and TV shows that I write.
This is the book that made my kids’ heads explode (not literally—this book is perfectly safe (as far as I know)) as it helped them discover the idea of parody: taking something familiar and twisting it in a funny, unexpected way.
We rolled and lol’ed together as we read Jon’s wild, hysterical takes on old fairy tales. The non-twist twist ending to his take on the ugly duckling story is still a running joke in our family. Jon’s The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs and The Real Dada Mother Goose are also great for the same reason.
The entire book, with its unconventional page arrangement and eclectic, frenetic mix of text and pictures, is a spoof on the art of book design and the art of the fairy tale. The individual tales, such as The Really Ugly Duckling and Little Red Running Shorts, can be extracted for telling aloud, with great success. Another masterpiece from the team that created The True Story of the Three Little Pigs! -Horn Book
From the ages of 1-4, my son Finn deeply rooted himself into the detailed world of Richard Scarry. These books could be such slow reads that we only needed two of them for long airplane rides. Through Finn’s love of Scarry books, I began searching for more books that delighted with detail. And when I did not see my family’s bicycle-rich lifestyle reflected in books, I created Cycle City.
Lift the flaps and take an intimate peek inside the villains and find what really makes them tick. Through a twist in classic fairytale storytelling and a sophisticated design, this book has reimagined the inner workings of the iconic fairytale witch, giant, and wolf. Pull levers and tabs, discover objects on strings, and open flaps to discover the real truth about the villains. Brilliantly creative and exploratory.
Internationally bestselling, oversized lift the flap book that reveals the secrets of the most famous fairytale villains.
Explore if you dare! Take a look inside and discover the villainous tricks inside the heads of an ogre, a wolf and a witch. Lift the flaps to find out what’s beneath their disguise and who was the victim of their last meal (now comfortably settled inside their stomach!).
This exquisitely produced large fold-out book is like no other: a celebration of story that’s full of humor and detail on every page, and has over 30 interactive elements that will mesmerize toddlers, pre-schoolers…
I’ve written dozens of plays and books, always with heart and humor. If you love Christmas, you know that it can also be a frenzied time, so we all need to curl up on a cozy night and read Christmas stories to bring back the magic and generosity of this special holiday. I like well-told tales that reaffirm the love we know is so important, stories that will mean just as much a hundred years from now. And surprise endings are always a delight!
Christmas is a wonderful time for magical tales that children love. In this one, a poor but good-hearted cobbler is rewarded for his honesty during the night, when clever elves sneak into his shop and make shoes for him to sell. It gives children the chance to imagine invisible helpers, and also the thrill of doing good deeds in secret.
Here is the classic tale of elfin magic, loved by generations of children and made new by an artist of international acclaim. Jim LaMarche's stunning paintings, reminiscent of his earlier work in The Rainbabies, are the perfect compliment to this favorite Grimm fairy tale.
The first thing I ever wrote was a play about a goose girl, and I’ve been fascinated with fairytales ever since. As a poet, I adore how the images speak deeply to our subconscious—fur, hair, mirrors, blood, snow, fairy fruit. As a nonfiction writer, my book explored witches and princesses, whilst my latest adult novel looks at a fairytale salon in Paris attended by Perrault. I hope this list convinces you that fairytales aren’t only for the nursery but are as important to literature as Greek myths—shaping our narratives and reemerging in surprising places.
An incredible feat of literary criticism, Marina Warner takes fairytales very seriously and as such leads us on an incredible journey through storytelling from the Queen of Sheba to Charles Perrault to the Brothers Grimm. This is the essential nonfiction title if you’re interested in fairytales, and it has shaped my reading of them ever since.
In this landmark study of the history and meaning of fairy tales, the celebrated cultural critic Marina Warner looks at storytelling in art and legend-from the prophesying enchantress who lures men to a false paradise, to jolly Mother Goose with her masqueraders in the real world. Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?
At the age of seven, already a devoted bookworm, I came upon a large stack of early-20th century children's magazines filled with stories, poems, and especially fairy tales, some the classic kind, and some weird, scary or unfamiliar. I don't know where those dog-eared, well-thumbed annuals came from, or what happened to them afterward – they were lost or given away when our family moved, I suppose. But I have never forgotten them, or the effect they had on my imagination and longings. I've been searching for those long-lost tales ever since... and it finally led me to decide I would just have to write a few of my own.
The 19th-century Scottish writer George MacDonald is said to be the father of the modern fairy tale, inspiring C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and many others. I chose The Light Princess because I find it his most charming tale: it's about a princess under a wicked spell who has been made weightless, unable to obey the laws of gravity. As in all good fairy tales, a prince eventually comes along to drag her back down to earth. He must sacrifice himself for her, but in the end, it is she who rescues him – from a feminist perspective, a most gratifying conclusion.
George MacDonald (1824-1905), the great nineteenth-century innovator of modern fantasy, influenced not only C. S. Lewis but also such literary masters as Charles Williams and J. R. R. Tolkien. Though his longer fairy tales Lilith and Phantastes are particularly famous, much of MacDonald’s best fantasy writing is found in his shorter stories. In this volume editor Glenn Sadler has compiled some of MacDonald’s finest short works―marvelous fairy tales and stories certain to delight readers familiar with MacDonald and those about to meet him for the first time.
I write fairy tales and folklore, dark fantasy and horror. I have an academic background in history and archaeology. I am Australian (yes, lots of scary creatures here!) but inspired by this rich, multicultural country with First Nations tales for over 60,000 years. I am fascinated by how fairy tales, folklore and mythologies can be similar and yet so intriguingly different across time and space, written and oral telling. I love the enduring power of the fairytale and how, with each retelling, it transforms it into a new story, and as people travel, new tales are retold and transformed into a new version for a new place and generation.
I adored this book. I loved its clever fairy tale reimagining of Beauty and Beast set in 1940s Germany under the Third Reich. I enjoyed the transformation of this classic fairy tale into a historical novel that was rich in detail and unique characters and revealed much of the hidden voices of resistance within Germany during this time.
Forsyth is a fellow Australian fairytale, fantasy, and historical author who writes fantasy, history, fairy tale, and myth retellings reimagined into new settings that I find inspiring and the power of the fairy tale to be retold and made new and to endure.
Australian paperback edition of novel by acclaimed writer, Kate Forsyth. "Filled with danger, intrigue and romance, The Beast's Garden, a retelling of the Grimm brothers' Beauty and the Beast, is a beautiful, compelling love story set in a time [WWII Germany] when the world seemed on the brink of collapse.
