An often engaging set of celebrated literary works with fun twists.
In Moore’s sequel fantasy collection, a family protects true stories disguised as popular fairy and folktales.
The Wellingtons have dedicated generations of family members to being “Keepers of the Tales.” These historians and anthropologists know the truth behind stories that the world has written off as fiction. Nowadays, Charles Wellington III safeguards their library of works, but it was his great-great grandfather Charles Wellington I who stumbled onto a life-changing artifact. He and a colleague unearthed part of a mysterious linen canvas inscribed with an ancient language, and he scoured far-off places, such as Turkey, for the remaining fragments. About a third of the 14-story collection centers on the first Charles as he searches for hidden truths in the canvas and runs into the enigmatic “Guardians.” The rest consists of tales that the later Charles has amassed. The first two, “Beauty…and the Beastly Prince” and “Sleeping Beauty,” have a surprising link: fairy sisters—a queen and her evil older princess sibling—who feud for years, hurting themselves as well as their children in countless ways. Others sport similar titles that make the fairy-tale or folklore source immediately apparent and follow those earlier narratives closely. In “Margaretha and the Seven Dwarfs,” Count Philip sends his daughter, whom he affectionately calls Snow White, out of Germany, afraid that his wife will do something terrible to his daughter. This collection aptly bookends the final tale with the prologue and resolves the first Charles’ plotline, with plenty more of the Wellingtons’ backstory left for another book.
As in his preceding collection, Twisted Fairy Tells: The Untold Truths (2021), Moore offers serious but occasionally playful interpretations. For example, “Jack” features the titular hero and the famous beanstalk only for the latter half of the story to dive deep into his family’s genuinely engrossing history. In the fun “Jack Frost,” the Arctic-dwelling protagonist revels in his specialty of “ruining anyone’s day” and bumps into another, decidedly more sinister character from folklore. The author occasionally enhances stories with real-world links; there are nods to the bubonic plague epidemic, and one tale deftly incorporates a 14th-century witch trial in Ireland along with the bishop involved and an accused woman. Although the collected tales take some unexpected turns, they’re not always as twisty as the book’s title suggests. “Cinder Ella” is entertaining but relatively light and not nearly as dark or memorable as the version by the Brothers Grimm. The fairy-tale variations, like the originals, are quick reads, as Moore writes character-driven narratives with impressive conciseness. On the other hand, the first Charles’ leisurely paced multistory journey retains a sense of ambiguity until he finally pieces the artifact together. It continually intrigues, though, even if the mystery of his dead friend is no mystery to readers. Unfortunately, most fairy tales open with the later Charles’ brief thoughts that offer morals that readers could have figured out on their own. Still, this is a minor complaint about an otherwise solid collection.
An often engaging set of celebrated literary works with fun twists.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66554-990-5
Page Count: 310
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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