Suspicious, suspicious...

This week a student walked in asking for a list of alternatives to standard fairytales for a paper she was writing for class.  I proceeded with the typical reference interview:  What did she mean by alternatives?  Retellings that were slightly different?  (Idries Shaw's World Tales immediately came to mind.)

After some back and forth, after I suggested The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by A. Wolf, Wicked and a couple of other perfectly hilarious retellings of traditional children's tales--not necessarily fairy tales--she decided what she really wanted was a feminist retelling of a fairytale or children's story.

At that point I was stumped although in the back of my mind I could remember some writer who studied children's stories from an alternative viewpoint, which I thought was feminist, and I vaguely remembered this author as having mentioned feminist fairytales/children's stories in her books.  (I since realized I was thinking about Jane Yolen.)
I suggested that she go to the public library and talk to a children's librarian who would be versed in the kind of quests she was undertaking.  I explained that since we were a college library that the librarians aren't quite as up-to-date on children's literature as the public librarians are.

And here is where the entire thing broke down.  Suddenly, she's asking me my name and saying that she has to mention me BY NAME in her paper.  Why?  Well, she turned vague.  It was part of the assignment...uh, maybe.

When I talked to some of the other librarians about this, a couple were very suspicious about what the assignment really was.  Could this have been a test of the librarians and their knowledge of books, they wondered.  If so, how were we doing?

I'm not generally suspicious about library patrons' reasons for wanting information.  In fact, I just try to get them answers to what they want to know--or at least point them in the right direction to find those answers.

But I must admit that the student and assignment in question did make me wonder.  What was really going on?