After deciding to include Mercedes Lackey’s Unnatural Issue in my dissertation about adaptations of the “Donkeyskin” fairy tale, it only made sense that I should read more books in Lackey’s Elemental Masters series. I wanted to understand the context of what Lackey’s bigger project is, how she has adapted the familiar characters of fairy tales more popular than the one I study, and how she writes women in more than just the one book.

And so, I began in the beginning, with the first book, The Fire Rose (1995)–a retelling of “Beauty and the Beast”–and then the second, The Serpent’s Shadow (2001)–an adaptation of “Snow White.” And as much as I love a good fairy tale retelling, I found it perhaps even more engrossing that Lackey anchored her novels in both fairy tale and history.

There seemed to me a stark difference in Lackey’s skill at adapting these two fairy tales into something new. Fire Rose seemed a bit heavy-handed, but I thought that Serpent’s Shadow was quite well conceived.

The beast in the first book was a grossly wealthy man who, through his own arrogance, turned into a beast who still talks, reads and reasons. The protagonist Rose, in the most feminist-y way possible, is well educated in spite of the men around her, hates corsets and such nonsense, and doesn’t see herself as beautiful–but the beast learns to see her beauty after getting to know her brain.

Snow White, in the second novel, is of British and Indian origin, no longer with creamy white skin. Her seven dwarves are animals with a touch of the godly about them. Her evil stepmother is her priestess aunt who has taken up with one of the evil gods in the Hindu religion. And what Lackey does with “true love’s kiss” within her world of elements and masters of magic is quite  wonderful.

Where this series shines, in my opinion, is with the historical focal points. The first book’s plot centers in on the San Fransisco earthquake of 1906 that devastated the city, and one of the characters makes a reference to the the magical origins of the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. The characters in Serpent’s Shadow are part of the suffragette movement in England and voice their concerns about and the consequences of Britain’s colonization of India. Also, Unnatural Issue interweaves the trauma of World War II as an integral part of the story with its own magical aspects. The plots are driven by these inevitable (in hindsight) events, but Lackey’s way of making them magical is the real spell she cast on me as a reader.