Storybook Favorites

While I stumbled across plenty of interesting storybooks in the course of this assignment, I’ve selected the following three because each of them represented something I’d like to aim for with my own project. So with that thought in mind, here are my selections.


Rama and the Other Avatars

While working on the week-to-week story retellings in Myth & Folklore last semester, I realized that my favorite stories to read and write were those that took the fantastical and transplanted them to contemporary settings. This storybook does that very well, following a protagonist who learns he’s an avatar of Vishnu and is charged with assembling the other avatars so they can team up and fight a demon army. It reads like the premise of a YA series, and I like how that brings a mainstream, genre angle to the epic stories.

Onboard the Spaceship Pushpaka

More than anything else, this project caught my attention because of its genre-bending approach. By taking story elements from the Indian epics and adapting them into a sci-fi story set in space, the writer instantly freshened up the source material, and I like the effect it gives. Beyond that, I also think the writer did a great job on giving the site a specific, consistent aesthetic: the cool greys and black of the color scheme give the pages a sleek, clinical feel, while the techy font looks like something straight out of a space captain’s log.

Sita's Soul

While the other storybooks so far have contained elements that line up with what I’m looking to do with my project, this one actually influenced the way I want to approach mine, which is why I’ve saved it for last. Last semester I decided I wanted to do a storybook with connected stories that told a single narrative in multiple parts, so that I would have more room to develop the characters and story world and plot arc. That’s still something I’m interested in, and it’s something this storybook does too. But while my storybook last year was composed of separate episodes that built up to a “myth-arc” finale, TV-style, this storybook features instalments that all point to the same goal: restoring the soul of someone close to the protagonist. It’s more of a quest format, with different steps and obstacles along the way, than episodic. I’d like to keep that in mind when I select the inspiration for my storybook this semester, because it would help me do something different and diversify a bit from my previous project—and also help me avoid needing to write extra “episodes” in order to finish the season arc, like I did last time.

Image Credit: "I'm a Lonely Soul" by Zura Shamatava. Source: 500px.