Fish Girl by David Wiesner & Donna Jo Napoli

Fish Girl is an incredible collaboration between Donna Jo Napoli and David Wiesner. A modern-day fairy tale told as a graphic novel, Wiesner’s illustrations show the reader a house that is also an aquarium, known as “Ocean Wonders,” and inside Ocean Wonders lives Fish Girl. Napoli’s words accompany the illustrations, giving the glimpse into the mind of Fish Girl, who cannot talk. There is a room, perfectly preserved underwater, and visitors to the aquarium try to catch a glimpse of the elusive mermaid while “Neptune” swings a trident that controls the waves, calling out:

“The Fish Girl! She is the mystery that lives in that lovely room. Look at her beautiful dresses and jewelry--all underwater! The Fish Girl! What is she? Is she fish or is she girl? You are fortunate to be here, for she is the last of her kind, and she can be seen only at Ocean Wonders!”

This is the only world that Fish Girl has ever known. Her only friends are the other fish in the aquarium, and an orange octopus. If, during visiting hours, she does a good job swimming around so that she’s not seen, but gives curious visitors a glimpse of her tail, Neptune rewards her with a story of how he rescued her when she was a baby. When Livia, a girl about the same age as Fish Girl goes to the restricted area of the aquarium, she actually sees the mermaid. Fish Girl is also curious about the human girl, and Livia gives her a name: Mira. Mira and Livia become friends, and Mira starts to see Neptune for who he really is: a fraud. How can she escape her house tank, when Neptune controls the air filter, the water, and her food? Mira starts to yearn for real friendships after meeting Livia, and begins to take her destiny in her own hands.

The Case for Retellings

Neil Gaiman
Photo: Kimberly Butler

Why retell a fairy tale? If you have something new to say. And Neil Gaiman retells Hansel & Gretel in a truly haunting, original way. Lorenzo Mattotti's illustrations picture not a house brightly accented with rainbow-colored candy, but rather a dark wood where shadow prevails.

Here, Gaiman focuses on the ravages of war, and turning out the children as a means of survival for the parents. It's as grim as a fairy tale gets. Unless you read Adam Gidwitz's A Tale Dark and Grimm, in which the parents try to decapitate Hansel and Gretel (they get their heads back). Yet Gaiman also conveys the father's conflict--he doesn't want to "lose" his children in the woods, and delights in their return.

Lorenzo Mattotti

Gaiman also characterizes the candy-covered home's owner as an "old woman," never a witch. Having painted these as destitute times, the author gives readers some empathy for the old woman and what drives her to desperate measures. Another of my favorite riffs on Hansel & Gretel is Donna Jo Napoli's novel The Magic Circle, which provides a history for "the Ugly One," as the witch in her retelling is called, and adds a layer of complexity as well.

Mattotti's artwork is stunning in its relentless swirls of dark shadows, which make manifest the darkness of the woods, yes, but also the dark side of the parents, which dominates their psyches enough to turn out their own children. The father here shares much in common with the father in Gaiman's recent adult book The Ocean at the End of the Lane, as if the man, overtaken by his obsession with a woman, is unable to stay true to his role as protector of his children. (Though Gaiman disagrees with my interpretation of the father's motives in Ocean in a very thought-provoking way.)

Fairytales' Enduring Appeal

Marissa Meyer
photo c Julia Scott

Why do fairytales endure? Why does a retelling of Cinderella as a cyborg (Cinder) and Little Red Riding Hood as the granddaughter of a spy (Scarlet, both by Marissa Meyer) captivate teen readers? At their simplest and most important level, fairytales are about good triumphing over evil. The darkness (midnight for Cinderella) and the forest (for Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and a host of others) bring about a change and a coming of age. Retelling fairytales offers an author the chance to split open an archetype.

We see this for youngest readers in books such as The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka, illustrated by Lane Smith; for middle-graders with A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz; and with Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles for teens. Her heroines from Cinder and Scarlet save their own skins. They don't wait for any prince or woodsman to save them. They assert their own powers of intelligence and plan their own escape routes.

Meyer ups the ante by placing Cinder and Scarlet in a futuristic world where the stakes are higher. It's not just their own futures at risk, but also the future of the planet Earth. Queen Levana plots to take control of the Earth to gain greater control of the galaxy. Yet Meyer keeps readers deeply invested in the characters she creates--Cinder, Emperor Kai, Cinder's android companion Iko, Scarlet, Scarlet's grandmother, Wolf--so that the larger plot never feels over the top. It's a delicate balancing act.

When I got to interview Marissa Meyer, she said that, as the series progresses, we see more of Queen Levana and what makes her tick. Like Cinder's stepmother or Scarlet's Wolf, Queen Levana is not all bad. "That's a goal for me as a writer--to make the villains as real and interesting as the good guys are," Meyer said. We see that with Donna Jo Napoli's portrayal of the witch from Hansel and Gretel in The Magic Circle, and more of what motivates Cinderella in Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted. What Meyer does is create a longer trajectory that integrates several fairytales in one four-book story arc. We can hardly wait until next January for the third installment of her tale.

A Need to Understand

The Greek gods have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. I loved their power and beauty, but also their weaknesses and petty jealousies, which made them seem more like us. Donna Jo Napoli, in her introduction to her Treasury of Greek Mythology: Classic Stories of Gods, Goddesses, Heroes and Monsters, illustrated by Christina Balit, puts it beautifully: “In reading the myths, we begin to understand that the ancient Greeks must have wanted more than just the big answers from their gods,” she writes. “They must have also wanted their gods to be a reflection that could help them understand themselves.”

Napoli went back to the oldest Greek sources for her myths, Hesiod and Homer. I got to interview her about her research recently, and she set me thinking about just how ancient these myths are. In fact, they’re so much a part of Western civilization that we make certain assumptions—Napoli was not exempt! She and artist Christina Balit had a point of disagreement about the half-bull, half-man Minotaur. Napoli believed that the Minotaur had a human torso on a bull’s body, but when Balit’s illustration of him arrived, she’d portrayed the Minotaur with a human body and a bull’s head. After Napoli went back to substantiate her view, she discovered that the oldest representations in art and sculpture convey the Minotaur as Balit had (you can see Balit's image of the Minotaur here).

It’s such a great example of how important that component is for us as readers, to be able to envision something in our own minds and “make it ours.” It’s why I’m so often disappointed in the movie version of events and characters from books, for which I’d already created my own images. Napoli could find no written reference about which way the Minotaur’s anatomy leans (only descriptions of a “half man, half bull”). The artists who made their ancient paintings and sculptures were the more readily available, with their bull’s head, man’s body depictions. With words alone, we can picture what makes sense to each of us individually as readers, but the job of painters and sculptors is to construct a physical representation of their vision.

For all of us, the seeds of that impulse come from a desire to understand the things we read about or experience in our everyday dealings. Very much like those ancient Greeks, trying to make sense of the events in their lives.