Article: Alternate Fairy Tales for Grimm Fans in 'The Girl Who Married a Lion: And Other Tales from Africa'

This recommended collection of African fairy tales, published in 2004, is by the New York Times best selling author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency mystery series. The TV series adaptation is worth a look too - wonderfully shot and acted. The way the stories are presented, both in the book and on film, it's no surprise to find a collection of tales coming from the same author. Clearly one influenced the other and, although the mystery series is not an adaptation of fairy or folktales (along the lines of Once Upon A Time or NBCs Grimm) it's a wonderful study of how fairy tales, with their ability to cross genre lines often and easily, can be inspiration for other genre styles and methods of storytelling.


But we digress.

This short article by Carrie Puckette, Staff Writer for The Clarion is wonderfully succinct and an enticing introduction to this different collection of fairy tales. These ones aren't as well known as Grimm's and Perrault's but they're just as wonderful to share with families and great alternate storytelling material. We'd love to see some of these adapted for film or theater in the same way Grimm's have been.

Being such a short piece, we're sharing a large part of it.

If you like fairy tales, but you’re bored with the Brothers Grimm, you can find a new variety of fairy tales from another culture in “The Girl Who Married a Lion: And Other Tales from Africa.” 

The book is a collection of originally oral stories from Zimbabwe and Botswana as arranged by Zimbabwean author Alexander McCall Smith. 

Appropriate for all ages, this 200-page collection contains a wide range of stories, including animal stories, mystical encounters, and moral parables.
Some of the stories within include “Guinea Fowl Child,” “A Bad Way to Treat Friends,” “Sister of Bones,” “Milk Bird,” and of course, “The Girl Who Married a Lion,” and many more, depending on what type of fairy tale you like. 

You can read the rest of the short article HERE.

Thanks to NPR, you can read a preview of a few of the stories HERE.

There's also an audiobook version available to hear with a free trial HERE, which sound worth the effort, with authentic narrators and a full cast.

Fairy Tale Bonus of the Day:

An artist named Kel McDonald, created a comic version of the title story in 2013, which is worth sharing. 

Enjoy.

You can find this and many others of McDonald's comic creations HERE.