Top Two Tuesday: Fairytale Retellings (Lamest Top Ten List Ever)

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic is top ten fairytale retellings I want to read. This is going to be the lamest top ten list ever because I’m not a huge fan of fairytale retellings. You’ve all seen me post this picture before, right?

I’ve just never found a retelling that I loved (no, not even Cinder). Even though I don’t like retellings, I do have two of them sitting on my TBR shelf right now. If you’ve read either of these, let me know what you thought of them.

The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly – Stephanie Oakes (Retelling of “The Handless Maiden”)

The Kevinian cult has taken everything from seventeen-year-old Minnow: twelve years of her life, her family, her ability to trust. 

And when she rebelled, they took away her hands, too. 

Now their Prophet has been murdered and their camp set aflame, and it's clear that Minnow knows something—but she's not talking. As she languishes in juvenile detention, she struggles to un-learn everything she has been taught to believe, adjusting to a life behind bars and recounting the events that led up to her incarceration. But when an FBI detective approaches her about making a deal, Minnow sees she can have the freedom she always dreamed of—if she’s willing to part with the terrible secrets of her past. 

The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly is a hard-hitting and hopeful story about the dangers of blind faith—and the power of having faith in oneself.

The Wrath and the Dawn – Renee Ahdieh (Retelling of “A Thousand and One Nights”)

Every dawn brings horror to a different family in a land ruled by a killer. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, takes a new bride each night only to have her executed at sunrise. So it is a suspicious surprise when sixteen-year-old Shahrzad volunteers to marry Khalid. But she does so with a clever plan to stay alive and exact revenge on the Caliph for the murder of her best friend and countless other girls. Shazi's wit and will, indeed, get her through to the dawn that no others have seen, but with a catch . . . she’s falling in love with the very boy who killed her dearest friend. 

She discovers that the murderous boy-king is not all that he seems and neither are the deaths of so many girls. Shazi is determined to uncover the reason for the murders and to break the cycle once and for all.