Storybook favorites: New twists on old tales

My favorite storybooks, of the ones I read, were each new twists on old stories. I was familiar with some and didn't recognize others.

Breaking News! Don Quixote: A Hero?

This was one of the titles that drew my eye, partly because it said "Breaking News!" and partly because I like the story of Don Quixote. I read part of "Don Quijote de la Mancha" in a Spanish literature class I took in high school, so I understand the gist of it, but a lot of the details probably went over my head because I'm not a native Spanish-speaker or reader. This version actually helped me recall the pieces of it that I've read. I thought the writer of this storybook did a good job keeping the lighthearted, irreverent elements of the story of Don Quixote in this reimagined version. Structuring the story as a local newscast let the writer get right to the heart of each of the silly scenes and got to show the perspective of what an average onlooker might think of Don Quixote. Design-wise, when I got to the home page of the blog, it wasn't immediately clear what I was supposed to click on, but I figured it out.

Love at First Retweet

I thought these stories were funny — I especially enjoyed the story about how Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf actually met on a Tinder date. I thought the author did a nice job recreating awkward Tinder text exchanges, poking fun at online dating apps and imagining the story of Little Red Riding Hood from a different perspective. It reminded me a bit of the movie "Hoodwinked," where Little Red, her Grandma, the Wolf and the Woodsman all tell their version of what happened to the police, and you hear vastly different stories. I didn't immediately know what the story was going to be about based on the title, and it might've been easier to understand if the home page had been the intro page. 

Real Housewives of Greek Mythology

I wasn't familiar with these characters or stories the author blended together, but the title and introduction gave me a good feel for what I was in for. The author's note also helped explain which parts of the story were real parts of Greek Mythology, and which conversations and settings were totally imagined. I loved how it was written as a script — it seriously sounded so much like reality TV — although the embedded screenshots were a little small to read comfortably.

Leto with her infant twins, Apollo and Artemis. Source: Wikimedia Commons