Tara Lazar came on the scene with her fun and zany book, The Monstore. She is continuing the fun and humor in two more books to be released later this year, I Thought This Was a Bear Book, andLittle Red Gliding Hood. With these two, Tara has proven to be queen of the fairy tale mash-up. “What I love about fairy tales is that they are so familiar to everyone,” said Tara. “And I love writing fractured fairy tales, because there is a whole backstory that everyone already knows, so the new story is both familiar and fresh.”
Tara’s childhood bookcase held a classic collection of little golden books, and Tara likes to imagine that the characters all have lives together somewhere. This may have been the mindset that shaped her two new books. In I Thought This Was a Bear Book, an alien gets knocked out of his book and into the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. As Tara describes it, “Chaos ensues.”
Her favorite fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood, was the jumping off place for Little Red Gliding Hood. She says, “What I love about Little Red is that there are so many permutations, so many places you can go with that story.” Also, Red provides plenty of opportunities for Tara’s kooky humor. A friend of hers was writing a book in which Red is a ninja. That friend urged Tara, who was a champion figure skater, to write about Red as a figure skater. “I used Little Red and smooshed in every other fairy tale and nursery rhyme character that I loved as a kid – Jack Sprat and his wife, the tortoise and the hare, Humpty Dumpty, Rapunzel,” described Tara, “It was really fun to bring in the other characters and see how they could help Red.”
The thing Tara liked most about the original Red Riding Hood story was that Red’s mom trusted her to handle an important errand by herself. “I really like stories where the child can go off on their own and have adventures,” said Tara. “Kids’ days are full of adults – the great thing for kids about books and stories is that the kids in them can have autonomy and freedom without adult interference or structure.”
