Enjoyable, imaginative retellings of classic tales—not for the nursery.
Fourteen fairy tales reworked for adults, by novelist Kasten.
Children are nightly lulled to sleep with fairy tales and fables in the hopes that the lessons imparted won’t fade with the dawn. Lessons about caution and selfishness but also self-preservation, revenge, insanity, patricide, incineration—all your basic kid stuff. This book revisits 14 such tales, giving each a fresh spin. The boy who cried wolf is now a grown man, a one-armed shepherd dealing with the consequences of his youthful transgressions. Close to madness from abandonment and starvation after their original tale, Hansel and Gretel plot to avoid future mistreatment by their soon-to-be stepmother. Beauty loves her Beast in spite of appearances, but she may find he can’t reciprocate when circumstances are reversed. Curious Baby Bear bites off more than he can chew when he removes a gun from his parents’ closet. Little Red Riding Hood sets out for grandmother’s house, but, distracted by the sensual pleasures of a secret meadow, she fails to reach the intended destination. This sharp yet charming collection of tales takes dead aim at human foibles and follies. Romantics beware: The ideal of eternal love is herein skewered, and the bloom quickly comes off the rose more than once. In dealings with the fairer sex, men behave cruelly, stupidly and only occasionally kindly. On a brighter note, a mistreated wife, once a virtual prisoner in her own home, becomes (post-husband) an empowered, enterprising businesswoman. Often the path in Wildwood winds unpredictably. One of the strongest stories, “The Magic Looking Glass,” explores the Evil Queen’s upbringing, pre–Snow White, and her fascination with a magic looking glass; its real-life, videolike scenes, rivaling those of satellite TV, induce a moral and spiritual catatonia as she becomes obsessed with beauty. Conversely, however, a lesser entry contrasting the perspectives of a duck and a swan misses the mark.
Enjoyable, imaginative retellings of classic tales—not for the nursery.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0983195955
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Kate Kasten
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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