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I expect wonderful things from the Donald Haase Series in Fairy-Tale Studies, and A True Blue Idea is a wonderful thing: a short collection of fairy tales from Italian-Brazilian writer Marina Colasanti, originally published in Portuguese. The collection includes ten stories, all original rather than retellings of older tales, although they draw on traditional fairy-tale elements. As Colasanti points out in her introduction, “This is a book of fairy tales, with swans, unicorns, and princesses” (1). However, her princesses fall in love with unicorns or turn into swans, rather than marrying princes as we might expect. In “Seven Years and Seven More,” the tale most closely related to the ones we know from Perrault or the Grimms, a princess is put to sleep by her father and fairy godmother, who think the prince she loves is not worthy of her. When the prince finds out, he puts himself to sleep as well, and there they both remain, separately asleep. They dream of each other, but are together only in their dreams. They live happily ever after—dreaming.
Most of Colasanti’s tales have similarly ambiguous endings. In the first story, ironically titled “The Last King,” Kubla Khan sails away with the wind— to where, we do not know. In the titular story, “A True Blue Idea,” a king has an idea, the first of his life, and it is so precious to him that he hides it in...