Twisted Tales

 

These are the first 5 books in the Twisted Tales series according to Libby

I'm a sucker for fairy tale retellings, and I love it when I stumble upon a good one. If I was forced to choose a favorite genre, it would probably be folklore. Hence my excitement when I heard about the series Twisted Tales on BookTok. (For those who don't know, BookTok is short for Book Tiktok and is sometimes also written as BokTok.) Luckily my library had the first 5 books available on the library app, Libby. I borrowed them and quickly devoured them.

Each book in the series takes one Disney movie and asks "What would happen if some aspect of the story was different or changed?" and then proceeds to tell the story but with this new twist. 

I will say while I enjoyed all of these, the best book out of this bunch was Part of Your World by Liz Braswell. Part of Your World had the most interesting what-if question, "What if Ariel had never defeated Ursula?" Choosing to change the ending of the original story changed my reading experience. It was more like reading a new story with the characters I knew and loved, instead of reading the same storyline and constantly comparing the two to see where they were different. This allowed me to enjoy the story better and get lost in the telling of the story.

The weirdest story is a tie between Once Upon a Dream by Liz Braswell and Reflection by Elizabeth Lim. Once Upon a Dream was probably destined to be weird because it explored the question “What if the Sleeping Beauty never woke up?”, so most of the book took place in Princess Aurora’s dreams. As anyone who remembers their dreams will tell you, dreams are always weird and most don’t make sense and I feel the author really leaned into that. Reflection was weird because it seemed silly that Mulan ended up going to the underworld. After learning that Diyu is the underworld in Chinese mythology it seemed less weird and I enjoyed learning a bit more about Chinese mythology and traditions.

All in all, would I read any more of this series? Honestly probably not, unless I were to finish all of the other books on my list to read. However, I don’t regret reading any of these books and I do recommend reading them to anyone who enjoys fairy tales.