Next Quarter’s Book Pick

Join us in reading this novel which combines and retells the fairy tales “Beauty and the Beast,” “Tam Lin,” and “East of the Sun, West of the Moon.” In March, Mary and Elizabeth will each share a review of this novel. Then, they will discuss the book and share their discussion here. You can join the discussion as you read along by joining our Discord community or our Facebook group!

Keep reading for more information about this book and the fairy tales which inspire it.

All three of the tales which inspire Echo North​ deal with the trope of a person (in all three a male love interest) being turned into an animal or monstrous beast.

The tale with which readers of Echo North​ are likely to be most familiar is “Beauty and the Beast.” The basics of the story are an impoverished merchant who steals from a prince who has been cursed into a beastly form, and then gives his youngest (and most beautiful) daughter to the beast as penalty for that theft. The merchant’s daughter ultimately breaks the beast’s curse, returning him to his human form, and the two are wed. While variants of this fairy tale exist across Europe, and there are tales with similar elements from around the world, the first written version of the tale as we know it by this name was by the French author Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (La  Belle et la Bête, published in 1740). You can find the full text the English translation from Lang’s Blue Fairy Book​ here. A popular, and more directly written for children, abridged retelling of this story by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont was published in 1756; an English translation revised by D. L. Ashliman is available to read here.

“Tam Lin” is a Scottish folk tale that comes to us by way of a ballad. The story is that of a woman who sets out to rescue her love from the fey, and needs to cling to him as he goes through a series of metamorphoses into various beasts in order to earn his freedom. You can read the lyrics of the ballad, as well as more about it, here. There are numerous recordings of the ballad available to listen to online, including this one by Fairport Convention.

“East of the Sun, West of the Moon” is a Norwegian fairy tale. It, like “Beauty and the Beast,” was included in Lang’s Blue Fairy Book in 1890.  Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe collected this tale, publishing it in their collection Norwegian Folktales (Norske folkeeventyr). You can find an annotated English translation of this tale here. As with “Beauty and the Beast,” this tale involves a poor man giving his youngest, prettiest daughter over to a beast who lives in an enchanted castle–in this case, a white bear. The daughter is married to the bear–who is, of course, an enchanted prince. In this case, the prince was cursed by his wicked stepmother and his curse is worsened when his new bride disobeys him by sneaking a look at his human form while he sleeps. She must set out to search for and rescue him after he and his castle vanish due to her disobedience.

Both “Beauty and the Beast” and “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” bear similarities to the Greek story “Cupid and Psyche” (aka “The Golden Ass”), from Platonicus’ Metamorphoses. You can find Adlington’s English translation of “Cupid and Psyche” here.

Joanna Ruth Meyer is an author of YA fairy-tale fantasy. You can find her on Twitter and on Instagram (@gamwyn). Echo North was her second published book. Her other works include Into the Heartless Wood, Beyond the Shadowed Earth, Beneath the Haunting Sea, and the upcoming novel Wind Daughter​.

Meyer has the text for a deleted prologue to Echo North (pruned as part of the editing process) available on her blog; you can read it here.