The Wishing Spell

Christopher Paul Colfer was born and raised in California. Several difficult childhood experiences, including a major surgery, his sister’s epilepsy, and severe bullying at school, encouraged him to seek solace and escape in literature and helped to spark a lifelong love of fairytales and myths. Although Colfer’s experiences with bullying were so bad that he was homeschooled for seventh and eighth grades, he attended public high school, where he was a star performer on his school’s debate and speech team. Colfer’s early acting experiences included community theater and high school drama productions, but his big break came in 2009 when he was cast as Kurt Hummel in the television comedy-drama Glee, which ran from 2009 to 2015. Colfer wanted to be a writer from a young age. Wishing Spell series—fantasy adaptations of traditional fairytale material—were his first books. This series includes six titles, beginning with The Wishing Spell, published between 2012 and 2017. Colfer is additionally the author of several picture books based on The Land of Stories series and many other young adult novels, many set in fairytale fantasy worlds.

In giving a backstory to the Evil Queen of “Snow White,” The Wishing Spell claims that villains are formed by their circumstances rather than born bad. In articulating this viewpoint, the book engages with ideas developed out of longstanding debates about the degree to which “nature” (genetic inheritance) and “nurture” (how a person is raised) contribute to a person’s individual temperament and achievement. Although most 20th-century research tended to emphasize nurture, the increasing ease of performing genetic analysis following the successful sequencing of the human genome in the 1990s has suggested that there is a significant genetic component to intelligence and personality traits like neuroticism. This is not to say, however, that a person’s circumstances do not play a role, and another late 20th-century idea—that of inter- or transgenerational trauma—animates the book’s claim that villains like the Evil Queen are made rather than born. Intergenerational trauma is the idea that the physical and psychological effects of a traumatic event can affect not just the victim but their descendants thanks to the impacts that trauma responses have on parenting styles. It was first identified in the second half of the 20th century, when Canadian researchers realized that the children of Holocaust survivors made up a disproportionate share of people seeking help in mental health clinics. Subsequently, similar patterns were identified among other historically victimized groups including (but not limited to) refugee groups from around the world, the descendants of formerly enslaved Black people in the United States, and the families of Vietnam War veterans. Although still a developing field of research and subject to ongoing development and debate, the idea of intergenerational trauma and epigenetics—research into how traumatic events can literally cause genetic changes from one generation to another—entered popular culture conversations in North America in the mid-2010s with the publication and subsequent popularity of Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score.

The Wishing Spell draws on the classical cannon of Western fairytales for its inspiration. In doing so, it deliberately engages with traditional repositories of folklore going back as far as Aesop’s Fables (initially oral tales first recorded around the 4th century B.C.E.), and including the collection of Germanic fairytales complied by brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, titled Kinder und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) and published between 1812 and 1815. The Grimms in turn drew on earlier works such as Johann Karl August Musäus’s collection of German folktales (Volksmärchen der Deutschen), which was published in the 1780s, and Charles Perrault’s French collection, published in 1697 and titled Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Tales from Past Times). These collections contain stories like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” and “Sleeping Beauty.” While the Grimms, Perrault, and Musäus focused on collecting and preserving written versions of tales that had a lengthy oral tradition, 19th-century Dutch author Hans Christian Anderson made many original contributions to the fairytale genre. His short moralistic stories include “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Duckling.” By retelling traditional fairytales with a modern twist—and specifically by giving the Evil Queen of “Snow White” a novel backstory, The Wishing Spell participates in a modern revival of folklore and a more sympathetic attitude toward traditional villains typified by Gregory Maguire’s 1995 rehabilitation of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, Wicked.