65 Books Like Jack the Giant-Killer

I am not a fan of fantasy, but this is magical realism at its best. Not too much, not too little, just enough to remind everyone that the spirits are still working on behalf of true love and goodness and that justice prevails despite all obstacles…like a fairy tale with complications. Just my cup of tea. 

How realistic is it that food transmits any emotions the cook may be feeling while making the food? This idea captivated me immediately; it was something I had never thought about. And yet, growing up in my family, women always made the food. So again, a very female tale.

In the beginning, Tita, the heroine, is passionate and in love, but she succumbs to tradition and rejects true love and passion to submit to tradition, which dictates she takes care of her mother. In time, Tita learns to disobey the injustice of that tradition… show more.

The author went on a journey to discover all she could about the pink dolphins (the botos) of Brazil, but she soon found herself immersed in the folklore and myth of this very real animal. She learns that people who live with the botos believe the dolphins are shapeshifters who live human-like lives in an amazing underwater world—the Encante—where everything in life is better. Even so, they come out of the water as human beings to visit our world and interact with the locals. They can only be recognized by the hats they wear to cover the blowholes in the tops of their heads. I love the feeling this book gives that we are constantly walking with the enchanted.  

In The Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade famously told stories to keep herself alive. In this novel the wife of a man in a coma uses stories to coax him back to life. The storytellers she brings to his hospital bedside include a raven, a ghost, a centaur, and Scheherazade herself. Even a house gets a monologue here. I love how this book brings the mythic aspects of life into every day for the purpose of healing. The underneath here is the man’s subconscious. The entities speaking to him exist in the every day; we just don’t normally see them. This book brings them all to life. A beautiful story beautifully told.  

This is Paula Gunn Allen’s modern-day retelling of many Native American tales. They feature talking animals, shape-shifting bears, and creation stories. Here, we see how the underneath comes to the surface in wondrous and awe-inspiring ways. The ordinary walks with the extraordinary. In fact, the ordinary is extraordinary. Allen sees power in these tales for women, and that’s what I loved about this book. These stories are part of a female shamanic tradition; they are in many ways medicinal. 

Lang’s story telling is compelling opening up for the reader the timeless characters of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel & Gretel, Jack the Giant Killer, Jonathan Swift’s “A Voyage to Lilliput” from Gulliver’s Travels, Aladdin, Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstilzkin, Why the Sea is Salt, Goldilocks, Blue Beard, Snow White and many others. 

My sister and brother (older than I) used to read aloud from, not only The Blue Fairy Book but the Red Book and the Green Book. These stories were the first I’d heard, and were so real I believed the characters would be present in my life. Grimm’s Tales ‘told’ by Lang becomes an exciting guidebook for a young person growing up. This aspect was ‘proven’ to me by the co-existence of these characters as archetypes in terms of life events and situations. My conviction is that the storyline, characters, and the progression of events in… show more.

For a rational, well-educated woman, I’m also occasionally superstitious. This gripping compilation of folk beliefs and rural ritual–from two stalwarts of folklore academia–is a book I return to again and again.

Almost every aspect of rural life has a superstition attached. From churning butter to childbirth, I pour over these weird and wonderful subjects and am reminded of just how pervasive and persuasive folk beliefs still are.

William Butler Yeats is one of my favorite poets as well as a playwright, co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Early in his career, though, Yeats rewrote many venerable Irish stories in verse and drama.

For a while, he lived in a run-down 15th-century tower in Co. Galway near his friend Lady Gregory, a fellow folklorist. Yeats collected tales of fairies, púcai, and ghosts from friends and locals, added his own visionary musings on the ancient landscape of caves and mounds, and created Celtic Twilight. Yeats’s fairies lured innocents to midnight feasts, abducted new brides, switched babies with fairy “changelings,” and caused all sorts of mayhem for mortals.

Yeats was an occultist and theosophist, ready to believe in fairies. He had a knack for inspiring wonder. “There are doubters even in the western villages,” he admitted, but “when all is said and done,… show more.

I love that Walter Evans Wentz, a native of New Jersey, starts this book among the towering stones of Carnac, a neolithic site in Brittany. While young Wentz was studying at Stanford, he met both Yeats and William James, the famed psychologist and lecturer on the supernatural.

They inspired him to pursue a doctoral degree in Celtic mythology and folklore at Oxford, and this book is his dissertation. Around 1910, he wandered the highlands, islands, and villages of Ireland, Scotland, Man, and Brittany, gathering an archive of fascinating fairy folklore to support his dissertation on the origins of fairies.

Wentz joined a centuries-long debate. Scholars had already proposed that fairies were disembodied spirits, products of peasant imagination, fallen angels, or—my favorite—a prehistoric and almost extinct race of pygmies who dwelt in the ancient burial mounds of Ireland. Wentz decided they were a pagan religion. Later, at Oxford, Wentz met T.… show more.

Holly Black is a master of the fae tale. Much has been said about this trilogy already but I assure you, the praise is well-deserved. Each book has a tight and dynamic plot, prose that fairly flies off the page, and a conclusion that is very satisfying. The first book was almost deceptive in the way it presented a not-very-strong protagonist until she evolves and becomes so much more than the reader thinks her to be. It’s the best kind of fictional surprise.