THE WITCH’S APPRENTICE AND OTHER STORIES

Garg imagines the in-between moments of Western culture’s most famous fairy tales and nursery rhymes—as well as the characters’ backstories in this short story collection.

Each chapter presents a question, followed by the “answer” in the form of a unique narrative. The opening query, for example, concerns The Wizard of Oz: “When the tornado took Dorothy’s house to Oz, it landed on the Wicked Witch of the East and killed the witch instantly. What was the witch doing in the road in the first place?” The answer, it turns out, involves an argument with her apprentice. Garg explores a handful of tales, including the motivations behind duping the naked emperor (in “The Honor of Emperors and Thieves”) and the reason why Jack (of Jack and Jill fame) was carrying that pail of water in the first place (in “To Fetch a Pail of Water”). Each story varies in length; the haunting “Denying Hamelin” is only three pages, and the longest, “The Beauty Before She Sleeps,” is 33. While none of the stories can be called happy, some are particularly grim in nature—parents left bereft at the disappearance of their children, death, betrayal, etc. Each story gets its own question and answer except for “Sleeping Beauty”and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” whose questions and answers combine in what feels like a fever dream involving shapeshifting witches and magic portals. While some stories veer toward the predictable (the real identity of Sleeping Beauty’s new lady in waiting, for example, will likely prove glaringly obvious to readers), these tales aren’t necessarily about changing the narrative of the established story from which they come. Instead, Garg adds depth and background to these familiar characters, making them delightfully all her own.

An imaginative, thought-provoking compilation that playfully—and sometimes morbidly—riffs on the classics.