Telling New Stories: Disability and Determination in Contemporary Young Adult Fairy Tales

Brigid Kemmerer’s 2019 young adult novel A Curse So Dark and Lonely, a Beauty and the Beast retelling, offers a familiar scene: a beautiful young girl is trapped in a well-appointed room in a lavish, enchanted castle. Someone dreadful has imprisoned her here, and she is eager to escape. But Kemmerer’s novel provides agency to its heroine soon after the Beast has turned the lock. Instead of waiting for her captor to allow her out of the room, Kemmerer’s heroine peers out the window, spies a trellis, and leaps for it. She lands gracelessly, the old trellis splintering under her weight as her body judders down the tall wall of the castle. On the ground, after the trellis has broken the worst of her descent, she thinks, “Oh, this was a spectacularly bad idea” (Kemmerer 55). Pushing past the pain of her fall, she hurries to the stable on the castle’s grounds and escapes (for a little while, anyway) on a horse appropriately named “Ironwill.” This heroine, Harper, embodies the kind of persistence and determination readers have come to expect from contemporary YA protagonists. She is bold, headstrong, and unwilling to bend to someone else’s plans – especially if those plans have anything to do with her oppression. At first glance, Harper seems like a typical “strong female character,” bringing a Katnisslevel will to survive to this fairy tale narrative. But she departs from the YA heroine mold in an important way: she has cerebral palsy, and her disability plays an integral part in her determination. Moreover, Harper offers a new kind of fairy tale heroine, one who not only pushes against the social structures that oppress her, but who also resists and redefines cultural norms. The history of the fairy tale retelling is replete with girls resisting and persisting. While literary fairy tales – those well-known stories by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Charles Perrault, for example – often feature passive princesses who patiently uphold the status quo, twentieth and twenty-first-century fairy tale revisions have increasingly offered heroines who flout social norms. Contemporary fairy tale heroines