In 2012, Sirens examined tales retold, with Guests of Honor Kate Bernheimer, Nalo Hopkinson, and Malinda Lo (and in our 2013 reunion year, Guest of Honor Guadalupe Garcia McCall represented tales retold). We interrogated retellings of myths, legends, and fairy tales from around the world, including their successes and failures in bringing greater insight and understanding to our own world.

In 2012, we suggested a number of books that retold a variety of tales. For Sirens at Home, though, we want to feature 10 books that we think have something to say about what it means to retell, reinterpret, and reclaim a tale as your own. Here are those books, as well as their opening words—and we’ve included links to those works at Bookshop in the titles. Bookshop supports both Sirens and independent bookstores, so if you’re looking to purchase any of these titles, they’re a great option!

1. Ash by Malinda Lo
	“Aisling’s mother died at midsummer. She had fallen sick so suddenly that some of the villagers wondered if the fairies had come and taken her, for she was still young and beautiful. She was buried three days later beneath the hawthorn tree behind the house, just as twilight was darkening the sky.”
2. Circe by Madeline Miller
	“When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and thousand cousins. Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities. We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves. That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride.”
3. Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
	“Harriet Lee’s gingerbread is not comfort food. There’s no nostalgia baked into it, no hearkening back to innocent indulgences and jolly times at nursery. It is not humble, nor is it dusty in the crumb.”
4. Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson
	“Oho. Like it starting, oui? Don’t be frightened, sweetness; is for the best. I go be with you the whole time. Trust me and let me distract you little bit with one anasi story.”
5. My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me edited by Kate Bernheimer
	“Despite its heft, this collection is a tiny hall of mirrors in the world’s giant house of fairy tales. Fairy tales comprise thousands of stories written by thousands of writers over hundreds of years. A volume published in the mid-twentieth century that purported to catalog every type of folktale in existence had more than twenty-five hundred entries; since then, countless new stories have joyously entered the world via new translations, folkloric research, and artists working in a multitude of forms.”
6. Never Look Back by Lilliam Rivera
	“If it’s a Saturday, then two things are true. First, trains heading uptown will forever be late, no matter what. Deadass. It’s as if the MTA decides anyone going past 125th Street must not be worth the trouble. So what if you thought the train you got on downtown was an express 5? It doesn’t matter. Right now, it’s a local. No, wait, scratch that. Right now the train you’ve been chilling on for the past half hour has decided to not even enter the Boogie Down. Who cares if you have things to do?”
7. Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe Garcia McCall
	“Juanita reacted first. Being fourteen and only second oldest, she didn’t usually take charge. But when she felt the corpse floating beside her, she started pulling Pita out of the water as if she were a sopping Raggedy Ann doll.”
8. The Girl and the Goddess by Nikita Gill
	“In This Story There is a girl who is stubborn And strong-willed and who makes Mistakes enough to fill an ocean.”
9. The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror by Mallory Ortberg (now Daniel Lavery)
	“Daughters are as good a thing as any to populate a kingdom with—if you’ve got them on hand. They don’t cost much more than their own upkeep, which you’re on the hook for regardless, so it’s not a bad strategy to put them to use as quickly as possible.”
10. Through the Woods by Emily Carroll
	“When I was little I used to read before I slept at night. And I read by the light of a lamp clipped to my headboard. Stark white and bright, against the darkness of my room. I dreaded turning it off. What if I reached out…just past the edge of the bed and something waiting there, grabbed me and pulled me down, into the dark.”

For more information about our 2012 conference, including the programming presented that year, please see our 2012 archive page.