A set of clever takes on well-known stories.
In his debut short story collection, Sanders reimagines famous fairy tales in updated, often brutal settings.
In this book’s first tale, “Rumpelstiltskin,” the title character is cast as a scamming junkie. The equivalent of the miller’s daughter from the original tale is a young woman named Jane who attends Catholic school, where she’s the accounting club’s president. Her father isn’t a miller but a beverage distributor named Malachy, and the evil king figure is a mobbed-up strip club owner. Sanders delights in juxtaposing the mundane and the mythic. In one moment we’re told that Malachy, “was eventually able to purchase a small beer distribution business including a reasonably maintained truck and a modest core of likewise reasonably loyal customers”; in the next we’re told: “One day, a woman he vaguely recognized deposited a baby girl in his hardened hands, purportedly his daughter, and left.” The “Three Little Pigs” become three small-town Vermont brothers—triplets fighting a predatory factory owner. The third “pig” is known not for a stone house but a stony demeanor, forged in the Vietnam War. In “Jack and the Beanstalk,” the giant that the young man encounters isn’t a physical giant but rather a larger-than-life Russian gangster. Sanders applies the same types of transpositions to five more tales, including “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Snow White.” His stories are often violent and dark—crimes such as rape, murder, and theft appear throughout the book—and are meant for a solely adult audience. However, this is fitting considering the source material; Sanders reconnects to the violence that appeared in the traditional tales and which was later scrubbed out in a process of sanitization. Indeed, this approach is very intentional; in his preface, Sanders locates his project in the histories of folklore, literature, anthropology, and psychology, and his stated goal is to reimagine “the story as contemporary plots informed by our modern psychologies, while hewing to their original storylines.” The adherence to original storylines can lead to some convoluted twists. However, finding out how Sanders makes these plots work is half the fun.
A set of clever takes on well-known stories.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Deuxmers Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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