My Storybook Favorites

Image Information: Diary Entries

   By: Sarah Beale

Taken from "A Dark Ever After"

I loved going through all the old storybooks and thinking of ideas of what I might like to do for mine. I have always loved writing, and originally wanted to be an author of fiction before I decided to pursue journalism, so this will be very fun for me.

Here are the three storybooks I chose to highlight on my blog:

#1: Tales of Mount Olympus High: A Storybook by Hayley Erwin

I really liked this one because I have always enjoyed Greek mythology, as well as retelling stories in modern times. It honestly reminded me of fan fiction, which I am admittedly a big fan of. I guess this entire concept of retelling these iconic stories is like fan fiction. Anyway, I thought the authors ways of altering the original Greek myths to fit in a high school setting were creative and cute. I think they could have added more detail sometimes, but all in all I thought it was good.

#2: A Dark Ever After

I chose this one initially because the title sounded so intriguing. It is a collection of "diary entries" of a few of the evil villains from the classic fairy tales we know. However, here there is not a happily-ever-after for those we are used to. I liked that the author changed each ending to something more grim than the usual telling of each story. I definitely think some of the diary entries could have been longer and more detailed, though. I liked the design of the Introduction a lot, with the photos of each diaries character. The black background and white text was also really cool. Since these were basically fairy-tales in reverse and all about evil, it made sense that the design was the invert of what we are used to seeing: white background with black text.

#3: The Untold Stories of Cleopatra VII

I clicked on this one because though I have always been intrigued by Cleopatra, I actually don't know that much about her life. I thought this storybook could possibly give me some insight in to some aspects of her life, though I knew not all of it would be accurate. I thought it was interesting how the author chose to tell the story through the perspective of the snake. I honestly don't even know if the snake killing her is true or not. I thought the design of this storybook was really good, though I wish the author had noticed that one some of the pages the first line of text blended into the background unless you zoomed in a lot. I liked that this one was still historic while having a creative twist to it.