100 YA Fairytale Retelling Ideas for Your Next Story
Fairytales have been retold for generations, but familiar stories can become something entirely new when viewed through a young adult lens. A princess waiting in a tower might become a teenager determined to escape the destiny chosen for her. The youngest son sent into the forest could discover that the monster he was raised to fear is not the real enemy. A supposedly wicked witch might be the only person willing to tell a young heroine the truth about her kingdom. By changing the characters, settings, conflicts and assumptions behind familiar tales, writers can transform old stories into original YA fiction about identity, independence, belonging, friendship, first love and growing into the person you choose to become.
These 100 YA Fairytale Retelling Ideas reimagine familiar tales through fantasy, romance, mystery, horror, gothic fiction, historical settings, contemporary worlds and completely transformed fairytale kingdoms. Some draw on recognisable stories such as Cinderella, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid and Hansel and Gretel, while others take familiar fairytale structures, characters and motifs in unexpected directions. Explore the Fairytale & Folklore Writing Hub for more fairytale prompts, names, settings, retellings and worldbuilding inspiration.
Whether you are planning a YA novel, developing a short story, creating a classroom writing activity or simply looking for a new way into an old tale, use these ideas as foundations rather than fixed plots. Change the original ending, tell the story from another character's perspective, combine two different tales or ask what the original fairytale never explained. For even more inspiration across fantasy, science fiction, mystery, horror, romance and beyond, explore the Creative Writing Archive.
1. Classic Fairytales Reimagined
Classic fairytales offer familiar characters, conflicts and magical rules that can be transformed into entirely new young adult stories. These ideas take recognisable tales and change an important part of the original — shifting perspectives, questioning familiar endings, introducing new motivations or giving teenage characters greater control over the stories they have inherited.
1. Cinderella has no interest in marrying the prince. She attends the royal ball because somewhere inside the palace is a magical object that belonged to her dead mother, and this may be her only chance to steal it back.
2. When a teenage girl is sent to live in an enchanted castle with a terrifying beast, she discovers he is not waiting for someone to break his curse. He has been deliberately preventing anyone from doing so because the human prince he once was did something unforgivable.
3. Rapunzel finally escapes her tower only to discover that the woman she believed imprisoned her was actually hiding her from a royal family that has spent sixteen years searching for her.
4. Snow White survives the poisoned apple, but when she wakes she remembers exactly who tried to kill her — and discovers the kingdom has spent years believing the queen's version of what happened.
5. On the night before her seventeenth birthday, a princess learns that the curse predicting she will fall into an enchanted sleep was mistranslated. She is not destined to sleep for one hundred years. She is destined to make everyone else sleep instead.
6. A mermaid trades her voice for human legs so she can reach the surface, but not because she has fallen in love with a prince. Her older sister disappeared into the human world months earlier, and the only clue to what happened to her leads directly to the royal palace.
7. Two siblings abandoned in an enchanted forest discover a cottage made from sweets and expect to find a witch inside. Instead, they find another teenager who claims children have been disappearing into the forest for generations — and the witch is the only person trying to bring them home.
8. A miller's daughter is ordered to spin straw into gold or face execution. When a mysterious stranger offers to help, she refuses to promise him her future child and instead proposes another bargain: teach her how to perform the magic herself.
9. A young prince is transformed into a frog by a witch and believes a princess's kiss will restore him. When the spell fails, he discovers the story about breaking his curse was invented by his own family to conceal why he was transformed in the first place.
10. Red Riding Hood has spent her childhood hearing the story of how her grandmother survived an attack by a monstrous wolf. When she encounters the creature herself, it recognises her family name — and tells her that her grandmother was never the victim in the story.
2. Dark & Gothic Fairytale Retellings
Fairytales have always contained darkness beneath their magic: poisoned fruit, cursed castles, dangerous forests, cruel bargains and characters who disappear behind locked doors. These YA retellings draw those elements to the surface, transforming familiar tales into gothic stories filled with unsettling magic, haunted places, family secrets and teenagers beginning to question whether the monsters in their stories are really the ones they were taught to fear.
11. Every girl in Cinderella's family who wears the glass slippers eventually disappears. When Cinderella finds them hidden among her dead mother's belongings, she decides to wear them to the royal ball and discover where the missing women went.
12. Beauty arrives at the Beast's castle expecting a monster, but finds an empty palace where doors open by themselves and a disembodied voice warns her never to enter the abandoned west wing. When she eventually does, she discovers portraits of dozens of previous Beauties — and every one of them has her face.
13. After escaping her tower, Rapunzel begins dreaming about the girls who lived there before her. Each night, another girl shows her how she died, and together their stories reveal why the tower must never be left empty.
14. Snow White's stepmother owns a mirror capable of revealing the person who poses the greatest threat to the kingdom. For sixteen years it has shown nothing but Snow White's reflection, and on the princess's seventeenth birthday, Snow finally decides to ask the mirror why.
15. A sleeping princess has lain untouched inside a ruined castle for almost a century, surrounded by an impenetrable wall of thorns. When a teenage grave robber finds a hidden passage inside, she discovers the princess is awake — and has been begging people not to break the spell keeping something else asleep beneath the castle.
16. Red Riding Hood's village leaves offerings at the forest boundary every full moon to keep the wolves away. When Red discovers her grandmother's name written on a century-old list of offerings, she begins to suspect the creatures outside the village are not the ones demanding sacrifices.
17. A teenage girl inherits the remote estate where her ancestor Bluebeard supposedly murdered his wives. While exploring the abandoned house, she finds the infamous locked room — but instead of bodies, it contains letters written by the missing women describing how they planned their escape.
18. Hansel and Gretel escaped the witch's cottage as children, but years later Gretel begins finding sweets outside her bedroom window. When Hansel disappears overnight, she must return to the forest and confront the possibility that they never truly escaped the witch's bargain.
19. A princess cursed to dance every night wakes each morning with bloodied feet and no memory of where she has been. When her youngest sister secretly follows her, she discovers twelve princesses dancing beneath the palace with the ghosts of people their family condemned to death.
20. A girl is warned never to open the final door in her father's enormous manor. After his sudden death, she unlocks it and discovers an overgrown garden containing a single rose bush, a stone statue of a teenage boy and a handwritten note in her father's journal: Whatever he promises you, do not wake him.
3. Contemporary & Modern Fairytale Retellings
Fairytale conflicts can work just as well without enchanted kingdoms and medieval castles. These YA retellings bring familiar stories into the modern world, transforming royal balls, mysterious towers, wicked stepfamilies, dangerous bargains and forbidden places into schools, cities, wealthy families, online communities and contemporary teenage life while keeping the heart of the original tale recognisable.
21. A scholarship student living with her wealthy stepmother and stepsisters secretly designs clothes under an anonymous online identity. When one of her creations becomes the centrepiece of an exclusive school gala, she has one night to enter a world she is usually expected to serve from the sidelines.
22. A teenager whose intensely protective mother has homeschooled her for her entire life discovers that the medical condition supposedly preventing her from leaving their high-rise apartment does not exist. Her first secret journey into the city leads her to someone who claims to know why her mother has really been hiding her.
23. The daughter of a famous politician has spent years being compared with her glamorous stepmother, whose carefully managed social-media image has made her beloved across the country. When an anonymous account begins sending the girl evidence that her stepmother has been destroying anyone who threatens the family's reputation, she must decide how much of her own life she is willing to expose to prove it.
24. A teenager takes a summer job at an isolated luxury hotel to help pay her father's debts and quickly becomes fascinated by the owner's reclusive son, whom nobody in town has seen since an accident years earlier. The closer she gets to him, the more she suspects the frightening rumours surrounding him were deliberately created to keep people away.
25. After her grandmother disappears from a remote village, a seventeen-year-old girl travels alone to her house carrying the red coat her grandmother always insisted she wear on the journey. A stranger begins following her from the bus station, but he may be trying to warn her about the person already waiting inside the house.
26. Two siblings are sent to a prestigious wilderness programme after their parents decide they have become too difficult to handle. When the organisers confiscate their phones and abandon their group deep in the forest, they discover an elaborate retreat owned by a woman who seems far more interested in keeping teenagers there than rehabilitating them.
27. A talented teenage swimmer earns a place at an elite coastal academy and becomes obsessed with a boy she repeatedly sees on the shore during early-morning training. After risking her scholarship to meet him, she discovers that the life she imagined he had is as carefully constructed as the version of herself she has been presenting to everyone else.
28. A shy student agrees to help an unpopular classmate improve his image before the school formal after a cruel viral video turns him into a joke. As they become friends, she discovers that the anonymous person responsible for humiliating him is someone much closer to her than she realised.
29. Twelve sisters from an intensely private celebrity family become an online mystery when they are repeatedly photographed sneaking out of their heavily guarded home in elaborate dresses after midnight. Their youngest sister finally reveals the truth to a teenage journalist: they have been attending a secret underground club created by young people desperate to escape the futures their families have planned for them.
30. A teenager accepts an anonymous classmate's offer to complete an impossible assignment that could determine whether she receives the scholarship she desperately needs. The only payment he requests is a favour to be named later, but months afterwards he returns to collect it — and asks her to help him expose the prestigious school that both of their families depend upon.
4. Romantic Fairytale Retellings
Romance sits at the heart of many traditional fairytales, but YA retellings can question what happens when love is more complicated than a magical kiss and an instant happily-ever-after. These story ideas reimagine familiar tales through forbidden relationships, rivals, unexpected alliances, first love and characters forced to choose between the futures others have written for them and the people they actually want beside them.
31. Cinderella attends the royal ball intending to expose the prince whose family destroyed her father's reputation. Instead, she spends the night falling for a masked stranger who shares her hatred of the monarchy — only to discover at midnight that he is the prince she came to ruin.
32. Beauty volunteers to live in an enchanted castle to save her younger brother, expecting to become the prisoner of a cursed prince. Instead, she discovers the Beast is her childhood best friend, who disappeared from the kingdom years earlier and no longer remembers who she is.
33. Rapunzel has secretly exchanged letters with a mysterious boy for years by lowering them from her tower window. When he finally promises to help her escape, another teenager arrives first claiming to be the person who has actually been writing the letters.
34. A mermaid princess is forbidden from approaching the surface after generations of conflict between humans and merfolk. When she secretly rescues the daughter of the human queen from a shipwreck, the two girls begin meeting along the coastline and uncover a secret that could restart the war between their kingdoms.
35. Sleeping Beauty wakes after one hundred years expecting the prince from her dreams to be waiting for her. Instead, she is rescued by his teenage descendant, who has spent her entire life being trained to kill the supposedly dangerous princess if she ever wakes.
36. Red Riding Hood comes from a family of legendary wolf hunters and has been promised since childhood to the boy expected to become their village's next leader. Then she discovers that the mysterious teenager she keeps meeting in the forest belongs to the shapeshifting wolf clan her family has sworn to destroy.
37. Snow White escapes an assassination attempt and seeks refuge with seven teenage rebels hiding in the mountains. Their leader is the son of the huntsman originally ordered to kill her, and he believes restoring Snow to the throne would be just as dangerous as leaving her stepmother in power.
38. A princess is told that only true love's kiss can transform the enchanted frog she discovers beside the palace lake. Unfortunately, the frog is a cursed prince from her kingdom's greatest enemy — and breaking his spell could force her into the political marriage she has spent years trying to avoid.
39. After secretly attending twelve forbidden midnight balls, the youngest of twelve princesses falls for a musician from the underground kingdom where the dances are held. When her father offers her hand in marriage to whoever can discover where his daughters disappear each night, the person who solves the mystery is the boy she was expected to marry all along.
40. A teenage girl promises her firstborn child to a mysterious boy who helps her complete an impossible magical task, laughing because she has no intention of ever having children. Years later, when they meet again as rival apprentices at the royal court, he admits he never wanted the promised child — he made the impossible bargain because it was the only way to ensure she would have to find him again.
5. Fairytale Mysteries & Thrillers
Fairytales are filled with unanswered questions: missing children, mysterious curses, unexplained deaths, hidden identities and characters who vanish into forests or locked castles. These YA retellings turn familiar tales into mysteries and thrillers, giving teenage protagonists secrets to uncover, suspects to investigate and dangerous versions of the truth hiding beneath the stories everyone believes.
41. Snow White's stepmother is arrested for attempting to poison her, but Snow knows the queen could not have prepared the poisoned apple. When a second one appears inside her locked bedroom, she begins investigating who actually wants the future queen dead.
42. Cinderella disappears immediately after the royal ball, leaving behind a glass slipper covered in blood. When her stepsister becomes the kingdom's prime suspect, she must reconstruct Cinderella's final night and discover what she was really doing inside the palace.
43. Girls with extraordinarily long hair have been disappearing from villages across the kingdom for years. A teenage investigator follows the latest victim's trail into the forest and discovers a collection of hidden towers — each containing evidence that the missing girls were chosen for a reason.
44. Beauty returns from the Beast's castle alone and refuses to explain what happened there. When her younger sister secretly travels to the abandoned estate searching for answers, she finds the castle empty, the Beast missing and Beauty's name carved into a list of girls who visited decades before she was born.
45. Everyone remembers the prince waking Sleeping Beauty with true love's kiss, but nobody can explain how he entered a castle sealed behind magical thorns. Years later, the princess's teenage daughter discovers his private journal and realises her parents have been lying about the night her mother woke.
46. Red Riding Hood arrives at her grandmother's cottage to find the house destroyed, her grandmother missing and an enormous wolf lying dead beside the door. When hunters blame a nearby wolf pack, Red notices something impossible: the animal was killed with her grandmother's own silver knife.
47. Hansel and Gretel became famous after escaping the witch who tried to eat them, but ten years later another child disappears near the same forest. Gretel returns to investigate and discovers the new victim deliberately left a trail of breadcrumbs leading towards the witch's cottage.
48. A prince announces that he will marry whichever girl can fit the mysterious glass slipper left behind at the ball. When several girls who try it on subsequently disappear, a teenage palace servant begins to suspect the search is not intended to find Cinderella at all.
49. The youngest of twelve princesses wakes to discover one of her sisters missing and eleven pairs of dancing shoes beside their beds instead of twelve. Nobody else remembers the missing princess ever existing, forcing her to follow the secret midnight route beneath the palace alone.
50. A wealthy young nobleman known as Bluebeard has married three women, all of whom supposedly abandoned him shortly after their weddings. When his teenage sister receives a letter written in the handwriting of his first missing wife, she begins searching the family's enormous estate for the locked room her brother has forbidden her from entering.
6. Villains, Witches & Misunderstood Monsters
Every fairytale depends on someone being called the villain, but the traditional version of the story rarely belongs to them. These YA retellings shift the perspective towards wicked queens, witches, wolves, stepsisters, beasts and other supposedly monstrous characters, asking what happened before they became feared, whether the stories told about them were ever true and who benefits from deciding which characters deserve to be heroes.
51. Everyone knows the wicked queen tried to kill Snow White because she was jealous of her beauty. The queen's teenage daughter knows the truth: the magic mirror showed that Snow would one day destroy the kingdom, and now she must decide whether to finish what her mother started.
52. Cinderella's youngest stepsister has spent years watching her mother mistreat the girl living in their house, but speaking against her would mean losing everything. When Cinderella disappears before the royal ball, the stepsister discovers she has been secretly planning something far more dangerous than escaping her family.
53. A teenage witch living alone in a cottage made from sweets deliberately encourages rumours that she eats children because fear keeps villagers away. Then two abandoned siblings arrive at her door, and protecting them means revealing the real reason children keep disappearing into her forest.
54. The wolf from Red Riding Hood can take human form and has spent years secretly guarding the paths through an enchanted forest. When Red's grandmother begins organising a hunt to destroy every wolf in the region, he must convince her granddaughter that the beloved old woman is hiding what really happened during their first encounter.
55. Maleficent's teenage apprentice has grown up believing the sleeping princess deserved the curse placed upon her family. When she is sent into the castle to ensure the spell cannot be broken, she discovers the princess has been communicating with her through dreams — and knows something about Maleficent that her apprentice does not.
56. The Beast was once a prince cursed for his cruelty, and everyone believes learning to love will transform him back. But when a teenage servant discovers what he did before the curse, she begins to wonder whether becoming human again should really be considered his happy ending.
57. Rumplestiltskin belongs to an ancient group of magical beings who survive by making bargains humans inevitably regret. When his teenage daughter discovers that one of his contracts demands a queen's firstborn child, she enters the palace under a false identity determined to prevent him from collecting the debt.
58. The sea witch has spent decades being blamed for every mermaid who disappears into the human world. When her rebellious teenage niece steals a potion and travels to the surface, she discovers the missing mermaids are alive — and someone within the royal family has worked very hard to make the witch their villain.
59. A young giant has grown up hearing stories about the murderous human boy who climbed into his family's kingdom, stole their treasures and killed his father. When another beanstalk suddenly appears, he climbs down it looking for revenge and discovers humans tell a very different version of Jack's story.
60. A teenage fairy is training to become a royal godmother, granting wishes and guiding deserving characters towards their happily-ever-afters. When she is assigned to a girl whose story requires the downfall of a supposedly wicked witch, she discovers the woman marked as the villain is her own missing mother.
7. Princesses Who Rewrite Their Own Stories
Traditional fairytale princesses are often given destinies before they are old enough to choose them: marry the prince, inherit the kingdom, break the curse or wait for someone to rescue them. These YA retellings put those choices back into the hands of the princesses themselves, following young women who escape towers, challenge traditions, reject arranged marriages and begin questioning whether the happily-ever-after everyone expects is the future they actually want.
61. Cinderella's marriage to the prince is supposed to rescue her from poverty and secure her place within the royal family. Instead, she leaves her glass slipper deliberately on the palace steps and disappears before midnight, determined to build a life where nobody gets to choose her future for her.
62. Rapunzel has always been told that the world beyond her tower is dangerous, but she has no intention of waiting for a prince to prove otherwise. Using years of secretly collected supplies, she escapes alone and discovers the tower was designed not to keep the world away from her, but to keep her magic away from the world.
63. A princess has known since childhood that she will prick her finger on her eighteenth birthday and sleep for one hundred years. Rather than allowing everyone she loves to grow old without her, she spends the final year before the curse searching for the fairy who cast it — and discovers the spell contains a loophole nobody has dared to use.
64. Snow White returns home after her stepmother's defeat and is immediately expected to take the throne. But after living outside the palace and discovering how ordinary people suffered under both her father and the queen, she decides restoring the old monarchy may be the worst thing she could do.
65. The Little Mermaid reaches the surface and finally sees the human prince she has spent years dreaming about, only to realise she does not know him at all. Instead of surrendering her voice for the chance to marry him, she bargains with the sea witch for something far more dangerous: the ability to move freely between both worlds.
66. When her father announces that she must marry whichever prince completes three impossible tasks, a princess secretly enters the competition herself in disguise. If she succeeds, ancient law will allow the winner to claim any royal reward — and she intends to ask for her own freedom.
67. A princess locked inside an enchanted castle has spent years watching knights arrive to rescue her and fail. When the latest would-be hero appears, she refuses to let him attempt the same doomed quest and instead recruits him to help with the escape plan she has been constructing from inside the castle.
68. The youngest of twelve dancing princesses is tired of sneaking into an enchanted kingdom every night only to return before dawn and pretend nothing happened. When her father announces that whoever discovers their secret can marry one of his daughters, she decides to reveal the truth herself — and claim the underground kingdom as her own.
69. A princess discovers that the frog she has reluctantly promised to kiss really is an enchanted prince, but breaking his curse will automatically bind their kingdoms through marriage. Instead, the two teenagers form an alliance to find another way to undo the spell before either of their families discovers what they are planning.
70. Every princess in the kingdom is assigned a fairy godmother who guides her towards the story she is destined to live. When a sixteen-year-old princess learns that her future ends with a politically convenient marriage and the words happily ever after, she steals her godmother's spellbook and begins rewriting the story herself.
8. Fairytale Worlds Turned Upside Down
A retelling does not have to follow the rules of the original fairytale world. Sometimes the most interesting stories begin by reversing those rules completely: princesses hunt princes, monsters inherit kingdoms, wishes are forbidden and happily-ever-afters come with consequences nobody expected. These YA ideas take familiar fairytale elements and turn them upside down, creating worlds where young characters must question everything the stories taught them to expect.
71. In a kingdom where dragons rescue imprisoned princesses from dangerous princes, a sixteen-year-old royal has spent years happily living with the dragon who carried her away. When a supposedly heroic prince finally reaches their mountain, he reveals that the kingdom has declared her kidnapped — and an army is coming to bring her home.
72. Witches once granted wishes freely until one wish nearly destroyed the kingdom. Now wishing for anything magical is punishable by death, but a teenage girl discovers she has inherited the ability to hear people's unspoken wishes — and one person in the palace is secretly wishing for the king to die.
73. Every prince must spend one year transformed into a monster before he is considered worthy to inherit the throne. When a young prince's transformation becomes permanent, he begins to suspect the curse was never intended to teach future kings compassion but to eliminate those the royal council cannot control.
74. In a kingdom where fairy godmothers determine everyone's happily-ever-after at birth, a seventeen-year-old girl receives the first destiny ever declared impossible. With no assigned romance, career, quest or ending, she becomes terrifying proof that people might be able to choose their own stories.
75. Humans are forbidden from entering the enchanted forest because the creatures living there believe people are dangerous monsters from old cautionary tales. When a lost teenage girl crosses the boundary, a young wolf reluctantly agrees to help her return home before the forest's hunters discover a human is among them.
76. Princesses are trained from childhood to hunt the witches, giants and magical creatures believed to threaten their kingdoms. During her first official quest, a princess discovers the monster she has been ordered to kill is protecting a hidden community of children who fled the royal court.
77. True love's kiss is considered one of the most dangerous forms of magic because it does not merely break curses — it transfers them. When a girl impulsively wakes an enchanted prince, she inherits the spell that kept him asleep and has only days to discover why someone wanted the curse passed to her.
78. Every magical mirror in the kingdom has been destroyed because mirrors do not show reflections; they reveal the future a person secretly wants most. A teenage servant discovers the last surviving mirror hidden beneath the palace and sees herself sitting on the throne while the royal family kneels before her.
79. Happily-ever-afters are real magical events that freeze kingdoms at the moment their stories reach the perfect ending, preventing anything from ever changing again. A princess approaching her eighteenth birthday discovers her upcoming wedding will trigger one — and she has seven days to ruin her own fairytale before everyone she loves becomes trapped inside it forever.
80. In a world where every child is born into a recognised fairytale role — hero, princess, helper, trickster or villain — a girl assigned to become the wicked witch refuses to accept the ending written for her. When she tries to change her role, the story chooses her younger sister to become the villain instead.
9. Fairytale Mash-Ups & Shared Worlds
Fairytales become even more unpredictable when their characters are allowed to cross the boundaries between stories. These YA retellings combine familiar tales, connect supposedly separate kingdoms and imagine what might happen if princesses, witches, monsters and heroes discovered that their stories were part of something much larger. Characters who were never meant to meet can become friends, rivals or enemies — while changing one fairytale may have consequences for every story connected to it.
81. Cinderella arrives at the royal ball expecting to meet a prince, but instead finds Snow White, Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty among the guests. None of them knows why they were invited, and at midnight the palace doors lock as the king announces that only one princess will be allowed to leave.
82. Red Riding Hood has become an apprentice monster hunter when she receives reports of a beast terrorising a distant kingdom. She expects another wolf, but instead finds Beauty protecting the creature she has been ordered to kill — and insisting that Red's own grandmother sent the hunters after him.
83. After escaping their gingerbread prison, Hansel and Gretel begin travelling between kingdoms hunting dangerous witches. Their latest investigation leads them to the home of an elderly woman who claims her missing daughter was once imprisoned in a tower and stolen from her by a girl named Rapunzel.
84. Snow White's magic mirror suddenly stops answering questions about who is fairest and begins showing images of a girl asleep inside another kingdom. When Snow touches the glass, she is transported into Sleeping Beauty's abandoned castle and discovers the two curses were created by the same fairy.
85. A mermaid searching the human world for her missing sister follows a trail of magic to a royal ball, where she discovers Cinderella's glass slippers were created by the same sea witch who collects voices beneath the ocean. When one slipper begins whispering in her sister's voice, the two girls must uncover what Cinderella's fairy godmother is really hiding.
86. Jack climbs the beanstalk expecting to find a giant's castle but emerges through a window at the top of Rapunzel's tower instead. The two teenagers discover the beanstalk connects dozens of supposedly separate fairytale kingdoms — and someone has been deliberately keeping those worlds apart.
87. Rumplestiltskin has spent centuries collecting promises, names and firstborn children through magical bargains. When several of his contracts mysteriously disappear, his teenage apprentice discovers they have been stolen by the sea witch, who is assembling a collection of magical debts powerful enough to rewrite every bargain ever made.
88. The youngest of the twelve dancing princesses discovers that the underground kingdom they secretly visit each night is a crossroads connecting hundreds of fairytales. When one doorway begins disappearing after another, she joins a runaway Cinderella, a cursed prince and a suspicious young witch to discover who is erasing entire stories.
89. Every kingdom believes its royal family possesses the only surviving fairy godmother. When five teenage princesses arrive at the same enchanted cottage seeking help and encounter the same woman, they discover she has been manipulating their families' stories for generations — including deciding who becomes the hero and who is remembered as the villain.
90. Years ago, a curse shattered one enormous kingdom into separate realms whose inhabitants eventually became the characters of different fairytales. When Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Red Riding Hood and a young Beast each receive a fragment of the same broken map, they discover that reuniting their worlds could restore the original kingdom — but erase every happily-ever-after that came after it.
10. Fairytales After Happily Ever After
Traditional fairytales usually end at the moment everything appears to have been resolved: the curse is broken, the villain is defeated, the wedding takes place and the kingdom celebrates. But an ending can create just as many problems as it solves. These YA retellings begin after the familiar story is supposedly over, exploring the next generation, unexpected consequences, unfinished magic and young characters discovering that the happily-ever-afters they inherited may not have been quite as perfect as the stories claimed.
91. Cinderella's teenage daughter has grown up inside the palace hearing how a glass slipper transformed her mother's life. When Cinderella suddenly disappears, her daughter discovers the slippers hidden beneath her bed alongside a note containing three words: Find my godmother.
92. Eighteen years after Beauty broke the Beast's curse, their daughter begins transforming into a creature whenever she becomes angry. Her parents insist the original spell ended long ago, but she discovers the curse was never broken — it simply passed into the next generation.
93. Rapunzel promised that her own children would never grow up imprisoned as she did. But when her sixteen-year-old daughter discovers that she has never once been allowed beyond the kingdom's walls, she begins to wonder whether her mother's tower was the only prison in their family.
94. Snow White has ruled peacefully for almost twenty years when her teenage son discovers the supposedly destroyed magic mirror hidden inside a sealed chamber beneath the palace. When he asks who poses the greatest threat to the kingdom, the mirror shows him his mother's face.
95. Sleeping Beauty's daughter has grown up knowing that her mother lost one hundred years to an enchanted sleep. On her seventeenth birthday, she begins falling asleep for minutes at a time and waking with memories of a life she has not yet lived — including a future in which she is the one who casts the original curse.
96. The Little Mermaid became queen of a human kingdom and never returned to the sea. Years later, her teenage daughter begins hearing voices beneath the waves calling her by a name nobody on land has ever used and discovers that her mother's bargain left an unpaid debt beneath the ocean.
97. Hansel and Gretel became celebrated throughout the kingdom for defeating the witch who imprisoned them. When Gretel's teenage daughter finds the witch's recipe book hidden among her mother's possessions, she discovers every spell has been carefully annotated in Gretel's handwriting — including several written years after the witch supposedly died.
98. Red Riding Hood eventually became the most famous wolf hunter in the kingdom. Her granddaughter desperately wants to follow in her footsteps until the first wolf she is ordered to kill transforms into a frightened teenage boy who claims Red has spent decades hunting anyone capable of revealing what really happened in her grandmother's cottage.
99. The twelve dancing princesses closed the entrance to the underground kingdom and promised never to return. Seventeen years later, their children begin disappearing from their beds at midnight and returning each morning with worn-out shoes, strange memories and invitations to a ball their mothers insist no longer exists.
100. Every famous fairytale ended happily exactly eighteen years ago, and the children born from those stories have grown up together at the royal court. During the celebration marking the anniversary of the last defeated curse, every spell suddenly returns at once — poisoned apples appear, towers rise from the forest, sleeping kingdoms vanish behind thorns and monsters begin waking. The heirs realise their parents never broke the old magic at all. They only delayed it until the next generation was old enough to take their places.
Go Deeper into Writing YA Fairytale Retellings
A successful YA fairytale retelling needs to do more than place younger characters inside a familiar story. The original tale provides the foundation, but your version should have its own questions, conflicts and emotional stakes. Once you have chosen one of the ideas above, think about what you want to preserve from the original fairytale, what you want to challenge and why this particular story is worth telling again.
◆ Identify the Heart of the Original Tale – Before changing the fairytale, decide what makes it recognisable. It might be Cinderella's transformation, Rapunzel's imprisonment, Red Riding Hood's journey through the forest or Beauty's relationship with the Beast. You can radically alter almost everything else if you preserve a few important elements that connect your story to its source.
◆ Choose What You Want to Change – Give your retelling a reason to exist beyond recreating the original plot. Change the perspective, question the villain, remove the romance, alter the ending, move the story into another genre or explore something the original tale leaves unexplained.
◆ Make the Story Genuinely YA – Think about why your protagonist's age matters. YA characters are often experiencing important firsts while beginning to make decisions independently of the adults around them. Family expectations, identity, friendship, first love, belonging, independence and uncertainty about the future can sit naturally alongside curses, kingdoms and magical quests.
◆ Give Your Protagonist More Agency – Look closely at what your fairytale character actually does in the original story. If much of the plot happens to them, consider giving your version more opportunities to make decisions, take risks, solve problems and create consequences of their own.
◆ Question the Happily-Ever-After – Marriage to a prince does not have to be the ultimate reward. Your protagonist's happy ending might mean freedom, reconciliation, friendship, discovering their identity, finding a home, changing their kingdom or simply gaining the ability to choose what happens next.
◆ Reconsider the Villain – Ask who originally told the story and why one character became its villain. Wicked queens, witches, wolves, giants, stepsisters and monsters can have motivations beyond simple cruelty. You can make them sympathetic, misunderstood or morally complicated without necessarily making them innocent.
◆ Keep the Iconic Details – Glass slippers, poisoned apples, spinning wheels, red cloaks, towers, mirrors, breadcrumbs and enchanted roses immediately evoke particular fairytales. Decide which recognisable motifs you want to keep and find new meanings or purposes for them within your version.
◆ Change the Genre – A fairytale retelling does not have to remain traditional fantasy. Cinderella can become a contemporary romance, Snow White a murder mystery, Hansel and Gretel a horror story, Rapunzel a dystopian escape narrative or Beauty and the Beast a gothic thriller. Changing genre can reveal entirely new possibilities within a familiar plot.
◆ Build Beyond the Original Story – Fairytales often leave enormous parts of their worlds unexplored. Ask what lies beyond the forest, how magic works, where witches come from, why curses exist, what neighbouring kingdoms think of one another and what ordinary people make of the extraordinary events happening around them.
◆ Look for the Unanswered Question – Sometimes an entire retelling can grow from one detail the original story never explains. Why was Rapunzel really locked away? Where did Cinderella's fairy godmother come from? Why did the mirror answer the queen? Who cursed the Beast? What happened to Red Riding Hood afterwards? Follow the question that interests you most.
◆ Decide How Closely to Follow the Original Plot – Your story can closely mirror the familiar tale, use only its basic premise or become so transformed that readers recognise it mainly through recurring motifs. Establishing how closely you want to follow the source early can help you decide where readers should recognise the original and where you want to surprise them.
◆ Combine Fairytales Carefully – Mash-ups work best when the stories connect for a reason rather than simply placing famous characters together. Look for shared themes, magical systems, locations or conflicts. Perhaps the witch from one tale created the curse in another, several kingdoms share the same enchanted forest, or different characters are affected by the same magical bargain.
◆ Give the Retelling Its Own Ending – Readers may know how the original fairytale ends, which gives you an opportunity to play with their expectations. Let familiar events suggest one conclusion before taking the story somewhere new. Your version should ultimately feel like a complete story of its own rather than a familiar tale with a few details changed.
Final Thoughts
Fairytales endure because they are designed to be retold. Their enchanted forests, impossible bargains, wicked witches, hidden identities, curses and happily-ever-afters provide familiar foundations, but every new generation of writers can ask different questions about the characters and worlds inside them. YA retellings are particularly suited to this because so many fairytale characters already stand on the edge of enormous change, caught between the lives chosen for them and the futures they might choose for themselves.
Use these 100 YA Fairytale Retelling Ideas as starting points rather than fixed plots. Take the premise that interests you and make it your own: change the setting, combine different tales, switch perspectives, rethink the villain or imagine what the original story deliberately left unexplained. Cinderella does not always need the prince, the witch does not always need to be wicked, the monster does not always need to be defeated and happily-ever-after does not have to mean what it did in the original tale.
Most importantly, decide what your version of the fairytale has to say. The strongest retellings give readers the pleasure of recognising something familiar while gradually revealing a story they have never encountered before. Keep the glass slipper, the poisoned apple, the forbidden tower or the path through the woods if you want to — but change what waits at the end.
For more enchanted worlds, fairytale inspiration, folklore, writing prompts and story ideas, explore the Fairytale & Folklore Writing Hub.
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