Reading Notes: More Jataka Tales Part A

Reading Notes from More Jataka Tales by Ellen C. Babbit (click here for a full list of the tales in Part A)

I throughly enjoyed all of the Jataka tales, but I was most intrigued to retell the first story in this book: The Girl Monkey and the String of Pearls. Similar to my reading notes for my last Jataka tale, I want to go through the settings and characters and spitball about how I might change them for my retelling.

Setting:

    The Garden: A king's private garden, well guarded and full of monkeys.

I think I want to make all the characters human, so we'll change the setting from a garden into a beautiful palace.

Characters:

    The King:

The King did not play a huge role in the story, except for setting up explanatory dialogue. I think I might leave him completely out of my story.

    The Queen:

I want the Queen to be the head honcho in my story. The more I ponder it, the more I want to fuze the King, the Queen, and the Chief Guard from the original story into a powerful and clever ruler.

    The Monkeys/The Girl-Monkey:

When I think about who would steal a queen's necklace, the first thing that pops into my head is a dishonest servant/lady-in-waiting. What if all the monkeys became the queen's ladies-in-waiting, and one of them foolishly stole the queen's most treasured necklace? I have an idea about how I can incorporate the monkeys from the original story, but to write it here would spoil the surprise.

(Female monkey, Wikimedia Commons)