The first book that popped into my mind was Kitty Raises Hell. But I think the Bartimaeus books have jinn in there somewhere, and P.B. Kerr has an entire series, so maybe it's a thing with children.
I think "I Dream of Jeanie", like "Bewitched", is largely about the pressure to conform to standards of normalcy in mid-20th-century America, even when one is extraordinary, even when it's not part of one's culture and one doesn't understand it.
One of the differences between working with a story involving the fae and working with a story involving a jinn is that the traditions surrounding the fae are largely familiar to my presumed 'Western' and English speaking readers. As long as I keep to the more mainstream types of fae, I can assume that both my reader and I are coming from a similar familiarity and perspective and I can make my variations as variations. The jinn are unfamiliar to both myself and, usually, my reader. There are the common ideas that they are obligated to grant a certain number of wishes, that one must be quite careful regarding what those wishes are (a common theme in fairy tales) because they will generally disappoint, and that they are magnificent. I gather there is a rich tradition beyond that, but it would require both research and careful introduction to the reader or I'd run the risk of bad cultural appropriation and/or boring my reader with exposition.
On the other hand, vampires are almost nothing like they were before Stoker and subsequent popular fiction got hold of them, and that's worked out for the most part.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2012-07-07 10:50 pm (UTC)I think "I Dream of Jeanie", like "Bewitched", is largely about the pressure to conform to standards of normalcy in mid-20th-century America, even when one is extraordinary, even when it's not part of one's culture and one doesn't understand it.
One of the differences between working with a story involving the fae and working with a story involving a jinn is that the traditions surrounding the fae are largely familiar to my presumed 'Western' and English speaking readers. As long as I keep to the more mainstream types of fae, I can assume that both my reader and I are coming from a similar familiarity and perspective and I can make my variations as variations. The jinn are unfamiliar to both myself and, usually, my reader. There are the common ideas that they are obligated to grant a certain number of wishes, that one must be quite careful regarding what those wishes are (a common theme in fairy tales) because they will generally disappoint, and that they are magnificent. I gather there is a rich tradition beyond that, but it would require both research and careful introduction to the reader or I'd run the risk of bad cultural appropriation and/or boring my reader with exposition.
On the other hand, vampires are almost nothing like they were before Stoker and subsequent popular fiction got hold of them, and that's worked out for the most part.
Don't mind me, just babbling.