Storybook Favorites

Huntresses of Artemis: How to Join and Immortal Girl Gang
This storybook project covers a topic that I consider myself fairly familiar with, the story of the Greek goddess Artemis, goddess of the hunt, and her followers, a hunting group of immortal young women. However, this retelling of the Artemis myths was unique for several reasons, most notably that it incorporated characters from not just Greek myths, but also Sumerian and Indian myths. I felt like the introduction did a good job of describing, in loose terms, what the general topic of the stories would be, while still leaving room for surprises and deviations form the original myths. I also enjoyed how the stories incorporated Artemis interacting with characters from other belief systems; although it might not be mythologically accurate, I thought it was interesting to see how the different myth systems meshed.

Selkie Tales
This storybook project covers a topic that I'm less familiar with than the Greek myths. Although I am interested in Scottish mythology and have a passing knowledge of selkies and other creatures from the mythology, I don't have nearly the in-depth knowledge that I have of the Greek myths. I liked the frame story that was used for this storybook, of a mother selkie telling her daughter stories of their own kind. I liked the inclusion of a linked song on the introduction and in the last story; I felt like the songs added to the atmosphere of the story, and I might consider including something similar in my own project.

In the Seven Woods
This storybook took a different approach than the other two, using four stories compiled by one author, rather than stories from various sources, and combining all the stories to make one long story about the same characters. As with the Selkie Tales, I have only a passing familiarity with the myths in this storybook; I have more knowledge of Irish mythology and the associated creatures than I do Scottish, but I can't say I have any real familiarity with the specific characters, besides a handful of gods that I can recognize by name. I liked the frame of combining all of the stories into one narrative; however, I felt like using stories all from one source was a little less creative than the other storybooks, which pulled from different sources and even different myth systems.

Queen Maeve, one of the characters in In the Seven Woods