Kids Takeover hoopla!

The Abbot Public Library’s most recent addition to online services, hoopla, continues to expand its offerings by creating collections tailored to specific audiences. Recently, the hard working content experts at hoopla have curated collections for kids, called the Kids’ Takeover. These collections of children’s audiobooks, comics, ebooks, music, and videos feature new releases and popular titles.

AUDIOBOOKS

Disappear to bear country in the childhood classic stories, The Berenstain Bears: Brother and Sister Bear Favorites by Jan and Mike Berenstain, or visit another popular bear from the Hundred Acre Wood in A. A. Milne’s Winnie-The-Pooh. You might recognize the characters from Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen’s The Magic School Bus on the Ocean Floor from the TV show of the same name which came out in the mid ‘90s. Part 5 of the Magic Schoolbus Audiobook series, dive down in a schoolbus-turned-submarine and explore the mysteries of the deep blue with Ms. Frizzle and her class. For something a bit more magical, listen to the second of C. S. Lewis’s popular Chronicles of Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Check out more audiobooks in the Kids’ Takeover Audiobook Collection.

COMICS

If you’d rather read your books than listen to them, the Kids’ Takeover Comics may be more to your taste. Snoopy, Spiderman, and Percy Jackson are just a few of the characters you’ll meet. Everybody’s favorite lazy lasagna-loving feline makes a comic appearance in Garfield: The Monday That Wouldn’t End, which we can all relate to;  Garfield: Snack Pack Vol. 3, with food, friends, and a Sam Spayed mystery; and Garfield: Garzilla, in which animals are supersized and Garfield’s human friend, Jon, might become a werewolf!

For some Avatar-style pop culture, check out Avatar: The Last Airbender: North And South Part 1, the first part of the Avatar: The Last Airbender series which continues the saga featuring Avatar Aang, as well as a title from the series featuring his successor, The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire Part 2.

EBOOKS

Try some oldies but goodies. Read about amphibian friends in Arnold Nobel’s Frog and Toad Together, a story originally published in 1972 in which Frog and Toad grow gardens and eat cookies together. Penguins take over in Richard and Florence Atwater’s 1938 classic, Mr. Popper’s Penguins. Mr. Popper, a painter living in Stillwater, is given a penguin called Captain Cook. Soon after, he finds more and more penguins keep stopping by. This ebook includes an illustrated biography of the authors.

In the Kids’ Takeover Ebooks Collection, you’ll find even more classics such as Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree and Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery, the Disney Read-Along ebooks Aladdin and Moana, and other popular stories, such as Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer and Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney. 

MUSIC

The Kids’ Takeover Music Collection has some select albums, including Disney Princess: Fairy Tale Songs. Children will recognize tracks from The Little Mermaid (“Part of Your World”), Mulan (“Reflection”), Cinderella (“A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes”), Beauty and the Beast (“Something There”), and other Disney movies. 

For something more upbeat, Best of Raffi will have you singing (and maybe dancing) along to “Baby Beluga,” “Apples And Bananas,” “Shake My Sillies Out,” “Wheels On The Bus,” and “Mr. Sun.” So, if you’re happy and you know it, sing along with Raffi! 

After all that singing and dancing, when you’re children are ready to get tucked into bed, enjoy some nightitme sounds with Mister Rogers Bedtime, including the songs “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” “When the Day Turns to Night,” “Many Ways To Say I Love You,” and more.  

MOVIES AND TELEVISION

If you’d rather watch the Avatar than listen to audiobooks about him, go back to the beginning and stream Book 1: Water. You can also watch season 1 of Legend of Korra, the next Avatar after Aang. Kids’ Takeover: Movies collection has a lot of other familiar faces, including Elmo, Madeline, Franklin, and Arthur. For shows filled with sugar, spice and everything nice, try The Powerpuff Girls: Season 1, The Power Puff Girls (Classic): Season 1, and The Power of Four. 

It’s the first day of spring in My Little Pony: The Movie, and the Little Ponies are getting ready for a festival until Hydia and her two daughters, a trio of evil witches, try to stop the celebration. 

A mysterious power is at work in Pokémon: The First Movie which threatens human and pokémon alike. Do you know Dragons Love Tacos or Where the Wild Things Are? If not, hop over to hoopla and stream these videos now!

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Fairy Tales for Adults

Many fairy tale retellings are written for young adults. Why not, when most of the protagonists are girls who are becoming women? You have YA Cinderella retellings in which the Cinderella character grows up and leaves her evil stepmother behind, and YA Beauty and the Beast retellings in which the Belle character falls in love with a beast. But what about adult retellings? Below are a collection of adult novels that retell or are inspired by particular fairy tales. But be warned – some of these stories are not meant for children. 

CINDERELLA

Gregory Maguire is well-known for his novel featuring the Wicked Witch of the West as the protagonist, the story which became a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical. Turning the antagonist in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series into the good guy. He does it again here, writing the story of the stepsisters who Cinderella leaves behind in the original version. In Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Maguire spins the popular fairy tale into the story of whether beauty really triumphs over ugliness. Will getting the prince really lead to a life of happily-ever-after? 

SNOW WHITE

Unlike Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Maguire’s retelling of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” fits more closely with the tale which inspired it. In Mirror Mirror, Don Vicente de Nevada is sent by Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, children of a wicked pope, on a quest that will take years to accomplish, leaving his daughter, Bianca, in their care. Lucrezia becomes jealous of Bianca’s blossoming beauty, and, well, you know how the story goes. 

Things are much different in Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel retelling, Snow, Glass, Apples. The queen attempts to save her kingdom from her evil stepdaughter, but the girl, or creature, is not easily foiled. Between the graphic images and violent actions of the characters, this book is not for young readers or the faint of heart.

THE TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES 

Not as popular as “Cinderella” or “Snow White,” the story of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” is depicted in Genevieve Valentine’s The Girls at the Kingfisher Club. Every night, Jo “The General” and her eleven sisters sneak out to dance at club after club to temporarily escape the pressures at home, with their controlling father planning on setting them up for marriage. One night, they are caught in a raid and separated. Will Jo, the mother figure to all the girls, continue to put her sisters’ or father’s needs before her own?

MORE FAIRY TALES

The Snow White, Blood Red Anthology or Adult Fairy Tales series, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, is a curated collection of fairy tale retellings from some of the best writers, including Neil Gaiman (he just loves rewriting fairy tales), Charles de Lint, Jane Yolen, Robin McKinley, Patricia C. Wrede, Tanith Lee, and more! There are six books in this series, all available in ebook-format on hoopla:

Snow White, Blood Red

Black Thorn, White Rose

Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears

Black Swan, White Raven

Silver Birch, Blood Moon

Black Heart, Ivory Bones 

Each volume of dark fairy tale retellings reimagines the classic tales we all know in story and poem form. Some of these same writers are contributors to another fairy tale anthology, Happily Ever After, edited by John Klima, also available on hoopla. 

For even more fairy tales, and not just ones for adults, take a look at the Folklore collection on Overdrive or through the Libby app. You’ll find some of the ya books from the YA Cinderella Retellings and YA Beauty and the Beast Retellings posts, as well as currently unmentioned titles. Annaleigh and her eleven sisters sneak out to dance at balls, and four of the girls meet a tragic demise in House of Salt and Sorrows, Erin A. Craig’s “Twelve Dancing Princesses” retelling. For more by Neil Gaiman, The Sleeper and the Spindle combines elements of “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty.”

hoopla also has an extensive Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology collection of ebooks. Find out what would have happened if Aladdin never found the lamp in Liz Braswell’s A Whole New World, watch Cinderella slay zombies in Ella, the Slayer by A. W. Exley, or go back to the beginning with The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. 

No matter what your favorite fairy tale is, Abbot Public Library has plenty to choose from!