Are you looking for captivating reads to take you away to faraway places?  If so, you’ll love these enchanting fairytale retellings and folklore books!  Fairytales and folklore stories never seem to get old.  Something about them draws us in, intrigues us, and leaves us wanting more.  Besides, human beings are natural storytellers.  We use stories to make sense of our world and to share that understanding with others.

Across the world, different groups and cultures have myths, legends, and fairytales unique to them.  They share stories of life, creation, destruction, good and evil, passed down from generation to generation.  Some stories have existed for over a millennium, some a few decades, and others as recent as a few years.  But one thing these stories have in common is that they’ve often been recreated over time to span cultures and to meet a present moment in time.  If you’re looking for new reads to add to your collection, or if you’re starting out and wondering where to begin, then look no further! From spellbinding stories set in magical places to gripping tales, there’s something for everyone here. So curl up with a good book and prepare to be swept off your feet!

Captivating Fairytale Retellings and Folklore Books

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl.

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty, and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of Alice’s life on the road, always a step ahead of the uncanny bad luck biting at their heels. But when Alice’s grandmother, the reclusive author of a cult-classic book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate, the Hazel Wood, Alice learns how bad her luck can really get: Her mother is stolen away–by a figure who claims to come from the Hinterland, the cruel supernatural world where her grandmother’s stories are set. Alice’s only lead is the message her mother left behind: “Stay away from the Hazel Wood.”

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

A couple’s lives are changed forever by the arrival of a little girl, wild and secretive, on their snowy doorstep. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi

Influenced by gingerbread’s mysterious place in classic children’s stories, beloved novelist Helen Oyeyemi invites readers into a delightful tale of a surprising family legacy, in which the inheritance is a recipe.

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Mayan god of death sends a young woman on a harrowing, life-changing journey in this dark, one-of-a-kind fairy tale inspired by Mexican folklore.

The Winter Sister by Megan Collins

A haunting and suspenseful novel about a young woman who returns home to care for her ailing mother and begins to dig deeper into her sister’s unsolved murder.

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

Winter lasts most of the year at the edge of the Russian wilderness, and in the long nights, Vasilisa and her siblings love to gather by the fire to listen to their nurse’s fairy tales. Above all, Vasya loves the story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon. Wise Russians fear him, for he claims unwary souls, and they honor the spirits that protect their homes from evil.

Wicked by Gregory Maguire

Brilliantly inventive, Wicked offers a radical new portrait of one of the most feared and despised villains in all of literature: the universally maligned Wicked Witch of the West who, in Maguire’s imaginative retelling, isn’t nearly as black-hearted as we imagined.

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

A West African-inspired fantasy debut that conjures a world of magic and danger.

Zélie Adebola remembers when the soil of Orïsha hummed with magic. Burners ignited flames, Tiders beckoned waves, and Zélie’s Reaper mother summoned forth souls. But everything changed the night magic disappeared. Under the orders of a ruthless king, maji were killed, leaving Zélie without a mother and her people without hope.

All the Ever Afters by Danielle Teller

All the Ever Afters explores the hidden complexities that lie beneath classic tales of good and evil, all the while showing us that how we confront adversity reveals a more profound, and ultimately more important, truth than the ideal of happily ever after.

What do you think about the fairytale retellings and folklore books on this list?

Have you read any books from this list?  What captivating fairytale retellings and folklore books would you add to the list?