Wishlist Wednesday: Pipers, Beauties, Reels and Toads: FTs out now!

Next week, I'm going to give you a sneak peak at the looong list of fairy tales, retellings and "-esques" I can't wait to get my hands on.  But this week, I'm going to highlight a few titles that are already out and calling my name!

Beauty

Nancy Butcher

Queen Veda of Ran does not believe in growing old gracefully. In fact she will shun anything that makes her look or feel less than the fairest in the land including her daughter, Ana.

Luckily Ana has both beauty and intelligence. She realizes the way to remain close to her beloved mother is to make herself ugly. Ana does everything she can to maintain her new disheveled appearance: She doesn't bathe for days, doesn't wash or brush her hair, and bites her nails down to the quick. Her plan works. She has finally won her mother's love.

Then Ana realizes all the lovely young girls of Ran are being sent to the prestigious Academy for Girls, including Ana's best friend, Pell. When Ana's told she must go too, she resists. She doesn't want to leave her loving mother. But Ana has no choice. She goes and once there learns how potent a drug beauty can be.

Entwined

Heather Dixon

Azalea is trapped. Just when she should feel that everything is before her . . . beautiful gowns, dashing suitors, balls filled with dancing . . . it's taken away. All of it.

The Keeper understands. He's trapped, too, held for centuries within the walls of the palace. And so he extends an invitation.

Every night, Azalea and her eleven sisters may step through the enchanted passage in their room to dance in his silver forest.

But there is a cost.

The Keeper likes to keep things.

Azalea may not realize how tangled she is in his web until it is too late.

Piper

Meg Harper

Orphaned Tanith is lucky to meet Crow when she arrives in the treacherous city. Crow is leader of the street kids and fights to save them all from being snatched and butchered by evil traders. But Crow hides an unnerving secret, the real reason the children follow him so blindly which is a strange and unearthly power.

Toads and Diamonds

Heather Tomlinson

Diribani has come to the village well to get water for her family's scant meal of curry and rice. She never expected to meet a goddess there. Yet she is granted a remarkable gift: Flowers and precious jewels drop from her lips whenever she speaks.
It seems only right to Tana that the goddess judged her kind, lovely stepsister worthy of such riches. And when she encounters the goddess, she is not surprised to find herself speaking snakes and toads as a reward.
Blessings and curses are never so clear as they might seem, however. Diribani’s newfound wealth brings her a prince—and an attempt on her life. Tana is chased out of the village because the province's governor fears snakes, yet thousands are dying of a plague spread by rats. As the sisters' fates hang in the balance, each struggles to understand her gift. Will it bring her wisdom, good 
fortune, love . . . or death?

The Faery Reel

Edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Faeries, or creatures like them, can be found in almost every culture the world over—benevolent and terrifying, charming and exasperating, shifting shape from country to country, story to story, and moment to moment. In The Faery Reel, acclaimed anthologists Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have asked some of today’s finest writers of fantastic fiction for short stories and poems that draw on the great wealth of world faery lore and classic faery literature. This companion to the World Fantasy Award–winner and Locus bestseller The Green Man is edgy, provocative, and 
thoroughly magical. Like the faeries themselves.

The Bloody Chamber

Angela Carter

From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss-in-Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires, werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.

The Rose and the Beast

Francesca Lia Block

With language that is both lyrical and distinctly her own, Francesca Lia Block turns nine fairy tales inside out.

Escaping the poisoned apple, Snow frees herself from possession to find the truth of love in an unexpected place.

A club girl from L.A., awakening from a long sleep to the memories of her past, finally finds release from its curse.

And Beauty learns that Beasts can understand more than men.

Within these singular, timeless landscapes, the brutal and the magical collide, and the heroine triumphs because of the strength she finds in a pen, a paintbrush, a lover, a friend, a mother, and finally, in herself.

Briar Rose

Jane Yolen

Ever since she was a child, Rebecca has been enchanted by her grandmother Gemma’s stories about Briar Rose. But a promise Rebecca makes to her dying grandmother will lead her on a remarkable journey to uncover the truth of Gemma’s astonishing claim: I am Briar Rose. A journey that will lead her to unspeakable brutality and horror. But also to redemption and hope. 

Don't they look ab-fab?  I need to make a trip to the library, I think...

What are you wishing for this week?