Panel: Disney’s Twisted Tales

Brittany Rubiano is an editor at Disney Publishing Worldwide. Previously she was an associate editor at The Walt Disney Company. She is also the author of several children’s books including Frozen: Babysitting the Troll Tots, Royally Fierce, The Lion King (2019) Picture Book: Hakuna Matata and Have Courage, Be Kind: The Tale of Cinderella. 

Elizabeth Lim was inspired to become a writer by the myths and fairy tales her father used to tell her as a child. She is an author and a Juilliard-trained composer, and has written the scores to several award-winning films and video games. A Twisted Tale is an anthology series of books based around alternate “what-if” spins on familiar animated Disney films. In Elizabeth Lim’s So This is Love: A Twisted Tale (Disney-Hyperion) the question is: What if Cinderella never tried on the glass slipper? Unable to prove that she’s the missing princess, and unable to bear life under Lady Tremaine any longer, Cinderella attempts a fresh start, looking for work at the palace as a seamstress. But when the Grand Duke appoints her to serve under the king’s visiting sister, Cinderella becomes witness to a grand conspiracy to take the king-and the prince-out of power, as well as a longstanding prejudice against fairies, including Cinderella’s own Fairy Godmother. Faced with questions of love and loyalty to the kingdom, Cinderella must find a way to stop the villains of past and present before it’s too late.

Jen Calonita‘s first published piece was in the sixth-grade newspaper where she wrote about an attack snake who bothered her canoe on a class field trip. She is the author of Secrets of My Hollywood Life and Fairy Tale Reform School series. Frozen – the quintessential childhood movie – is back again, but this time with a major twist. What if Anna and Elsa never knew each other? As the future Queen of Arendelle, Princess Elsa’s life is full of expectation and responsibility-not to mention, questions. What type of ruler will she be? When will she have to pick a suitor? And why has she always harbored the feeling that some critical piece of herself is missing? Following the unexpected death of her parents, Elsa is forced to answer those questions sooner than she’d hoped, becoming the sole ruler of her kingdom and growing lonelier than ever. But when mysterious powers begin to reveal themselves, Elsa starts to remember fragments of her childhood that seem to have been erased-pieces that include a very familiar-looking girl. Determined to fill the void she has always felt, Elsa must take a harrowing journey across her icy kingdom to undo a terrible curse and find the missing Princess of Arendelle.

Liz Braswell majored in Egyptology at Brown University and spent the next ten years producing video games. Also, under the name Tracy Lynn she wrote Snow and Rx, and, under her own name, the Nine Lives of Chloe King, Stuffed and several other Twisted Tales, including A Whole New World, Once Upon a Dream, As Old as Time, and Part of Your World. She also has short stories in Geektastic and Who Done It and a new series of reimagined fairy tales coming out, starting with A Whole New World—a retelling of Aladdin. In Straight On Till Morning: A Twisted Tale (Disney-Hyperion) sixteen-year-old Wendy Darling’s life is not what she imagined it would be. The empty house after her brothers have gone to school, the dull parties where everyone thinks she talks too much, and knowing her parents have decided to send her away to Ireland as a governess makes her wish things could be different. Wendy’s only real escape is in writing down tales of Never Land. After nearly meeting her hero, Peter Pan, four years earlier, she still holds on to the childhood hope that his magical home truly exists. She also holds on to his shadow. So when there’s an opportunity to travel to Never Land via pirate ship, Wendy makes a deal with the devil. But Never Land isn’t quite the place she imagined it would be. Unexpected dangers and strange foes pop up at every turn, and a little pixie named Tinker Bell seems