Reading Notes: Week 2 Anthology

Beauty and the Beast? More like Beauty and the Basilisk haha. This was a very interesting take on the classic fairy tale.

(Picture of a castle with a rose garden in front: Pxhere)

The Key of Gold 

Josef Baudis (1922)

• Mary wanted three roses as her present when her mom went away unlike her sisters
• I might want to explain the meaning behind why she wanted three roses and relate it to her father (Where is he?).
• Her mom, on the way home, saw beautiful roses, picked them, and got caught by the basilisk that lived there. 
• I might try to change this and modernize it to maybe a bad boy or an ugly boy and the roses are from his house. 
• Mary, with no fear, went to the castle to meet the basilisk that demanded her in exchange for the flowers her mother had picked. 
• This idea seems kind of silly. What if the mother didn't have a daughter? Why a daughter? I will try to change this a little, so that the reason why the daughter comes to the place makes more sense. 
• The basilisk asked Mary to nurse him for three hours each day and on the third day, he asked her to cut off his head. 
• Obviously, cutting people's heads off might not be so appropriate for a modern day story. I will change this into an event which somehow reveals the boy's true face, similar to how cutting the heads revealed his secrets. 
• At the end, the basilisk turned into a serpent and then a beautiful boy. The castle was theirs to share as they got married. 
• In my retelling, I would like to tell a background about how the boy got there and why he was under the spell. 

I am heading towards a story about a bad boy who got kicked out by his family. I am not sure why yet and why he would have a big house to himself, but that is where future brainstorming will come in. This mother comes by and picks three roses, symbolizing the three things that her husband told Mary (I am thinking about renaming her Rose) before he died. Anyways, Rose, for some not thought-out reason yet, meets this boy and they basically fall in love and happily ever after. Excited to see what my creativity will do!