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Hansel and Gretel

Name: Hansel and Gretel
Author: Mike Klaassen

THE BROTHERS GRIMM STORY TOLD AS A NOVELLA

by Mike Klaassen ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

An embellishment of an age-old folk tale that adds intriguing elements while remaining faithful to most of the original...

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A novella offers a retelling and expansion of “Hansel and Gretel.”

Following the broad strokes of the original folk tale, Klaassen (Fiction-Writing Modes: Eleven Essential Tools for Bringing Your Story to Life, 2015, etc.) adds descriptions and a few plot changes. Young Hansel and Gretel overhear their mother and woodcutter father discussing their plan to take the children deep into the woods and abandon them to avoid their own imminent starvation. In Klaassen’s version, the children’s mother is not identified as a stepmother, and although their father hesitates to accept the plan, he eventually agrees. Hansel gathers reflective stones and leaves a trail when their parents lead them away, enabling him and Gretel to find their way back. Their parents, while happy when the children return, still can find no solution other than to abandon them in the forest. This time, Hansel leaves a trail of bread crumbs, with predictable results. The hungry children follow a magical white bird, first to a berry-laden bush, then to a gingerbread cottage inhabited by a cannibalistic witch who plans to fatten up Hansel for her next meal. This modern variation has Hansel, rather than Gretel, push the witch into the fireplace, ending the spell she has cast over the forest. Klaassen’s development enhances certain aspects of the story, such as the suggestion that the witch’s spell caused the famine; by killing her, Hansel ends the enchantment. But his reworking of the common fairy-tale device of the evil stepmother—making the children’s biological parents complicit in plotting their deaths—is more disturbing than the traditional version. More unsettling still is the children’s determination to return to their parents, perhaps to provide another opportunity for attempted murder. While Klaassen’s addition of descriptions, sensory details, and dialogue brings depth to his novella, there is a certain beauty to the spareness of the original version. Nonetheless, by eliminating the obvious villain, the author allows for more contemplation and discussion concerning both the parents’ difficult decision and their children’s innocent forgiveness.

An embellishment of an age-old folk tale that adds intriguing elements while remaining faithful to most of the original story.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: May 25, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.