Gingerbread by Robert Dinsdale

A boy is brought to the house of his grandfather, a bleak tenament flat in a Belarussian town.  His mother is dying of cancer and has brought her son to live with her father.  Slowly, reluctantly, Grandfather, or Papa, begins to tell the boy and mother the stories he told to her as a child.  Of Baba Yaga, the deep forests, and of the mighty Winter King and the King in the West who fought a terrible war over Belarus when it was Poland.

The mother's dying wish is for her ashes to be scattered with those of her mother in the great ancient forest beyond the town.  Grandfather, or Papa, is deeply reluctant but on a day when the roads are deep in ice he relents and takes the boy and his mother's remains out to a near ruined house.  It becomes clear that Papa is not afraid of the forest, he is afraid of not wanting to leave it.  Daily Papa remains in the house only venturing to collect the boy from school, then one day he does not come and the boy goes in search of him.

It is the beginning of a stunning magical cartwheeling story where boy and grandfather leave the urban for the wild and enter a world of stories, of partisan fighters who retreated to safety among the trees, of women and children massacred and the trees that drank too deeply of their blood and have become wicked, of survival, and love.

Dinsdale weaves the two parts of his story - narrative and folklore, together in such a skillful way that both drive each other.  Crises come, injury, new people in the forest, decisions to be made over loyalty, faithfulness and friendship, but always the ancient forest full of wildlife is a world beyond narrative where the past and present are bound together.

Mio's Kingdom by Astrid Lindgren

Karl Anders Nilson, known as Andy, is a lonely boy.  An orphan, he lives in Stockholm with his foster parents, Aunt Hulda who wanted a boy and Uncle Olaf who thinks Andy makes too much noise.  His only friend is Ben, but they sometimes fight.  The only person who is kind to him is Mrs Lundy from the sweet shop.  But then one day Aunt Hulda, after telling Andy yet again that the day he came to their house was an unlucky one, is given a card to post by Mrs Lundy and an apple that turns to gold.  The card is to the King of Farawayland.  Sitting in Tegnerlunden Park watching Ben eat with his loving parents through their lighted window he cries, but on the ground is a bottle and in the bottle is a genie.  For release from the bottle he grants Andy one wish, and he wishes to go to Farawayland.

A magical adventure of lost princes, love, friendship, courage, a white horse named Miramis, a bridge called Morninglight and a terrible foe, Sir Kato, begins.  Andy learns the truth of his birth and finds both happiness and a strength he never new he had.

Simply one of the most beautiful enchanting stories I have ever read.  I read this aloud over several days and nights to my 9 year old and enjoyed every moment.  Written in mesmeric prose, in less skillful hands this would have been just a good story to tell a younger child, but Lindgren makes it magical, mythic and unsentimental.

The Fairytale Princess: Seven Classic Stories from the Enchanted Forest by Su Blackwell and Wendy Jones

Seven classic fairytales featuring princesses are smoothly retold by Wendy Jones: Cinderella; The Frog Prince; The Twelve Dancing Princesses; The Princess and the Pea; Snow White; Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty. The book itself is large and satisfying, pictures on every page, each fairytale is of an ideal bedtime story length, not too long or too short. But the real star is Su Blackwells beautifully created and photographed paper sculptures. From one book a wave filled lake emerges in the Twelve Dancing Princesses, a castle rises from the opposite page, tiny paper boats float on the lake and delicate trees surround it. Snow White flees from the huntsman through the trees that rise out of another book, from a third a princess lifts a frog from a well. Enchanting

Reckless by Cornelia Funke

Will Reckless has followed his brother through a magic mirror into a strange fairy tale world and been slashed by a Goyl, a terrible creature made of stone whose wounds turn flesh to stone courtesy of the magic of a dark fairy.  Jacob found the mirror in his father's study and although he has never found his father in the world beyond there is plenty of evidence that he was there, iron bridges, mementoes from his world in the city museum, and the memories of people.  But the world is under threat, the troglodyte Goyl have come out from beneath the mountains under their warmaking King Kami'en and the Empress is preparing to sacrifice her daughter for the price of peace.  A spellbinding ride through the darker side of fairytales, the corpses of Sleeping Beauty's failed suitors hang from the thorns of the roses that defended her castle, trees pinion humans to have their eyes pecked out, magic is as deadly as it is glamarous.  My only niggle was the apparent lack of care of Jacob for the mother and brother he left behind, but a great imagination

Castle Waiting by Linda Medley

Castle Waiting begins as the fairy tale castle Sleeping Beauty slept in for 100 years before being woken by a prince, but Linda Medley asks what happened after she woke and went off with her price. Medley answers with a wonderfully bizarre story steeped in cultural mythology and fairy tales, homage paid to the talking animals of Aesop, to Grimm and Andersen but also, becuase this is a (beautifully drawn) graphic novel, to Rackham and Beardsley. The hardback itself is beautiful, a lovely size on buff coloured paper bound with elegant endpapers.

The Inside Story: The Sisters Grimm Book 8



This is Buckley's 8th Sisters Grimm book and once again it is full tilt.  Daphne and Sabrina Grimm are young sisters, fairy tale detectives and descendents of the great Brothers Grimm.  Along with the boy trickster king Puck they chase their arch enemies Pinocchio and The Master through the Book of Everafter, a kind of interactive storybook created to allow the Everafters - the storybook characters that populate the town of Ferryport Landing - to relive their infamous fables, fairy tales and legends.  But beyond the stories the three children leap through one after another in search of the Master and the girls' kidnapped baby brother something terrible is lurking in the margins and the final showdown turns out only to be a taste of worse to come.

Great fun and the idea of storybook characters being stuck playing out certain roles unable to escape from the boundaries of their stories is quite poignant.  The development of the characters of Sabrina, Daphne and Puck is interesting and sweetly sad too as they leave early childhood and Sabrina has to deal with new emerging emotions.

Books being read to our daughter

The Sisters Grimm Series


A great series about Daphne and Sabrina Grimm, the great great .... grandaughters of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the authors of the great Grimm's Fairy Tales. They come to live with their previously unknown grandmother in Ferryport Landing, a place where fairy tale characters, known as Everafters, are very much alive and real and trapped within the town by an enchantment that will not break until the last Grimm is dead. Cue mayhem, mysteries and a great deal of fun, and one of our favourite characters of all time, the fairy boy Puck, the self proclaimed trickster king. The hardbacks of each edition are beautiful, lovely illustrations, torn edges to the pages, looking like a great Grimm's edition

Book 1: The Fairy Tale Detectives
Sabrina and Daphne Grimm's parents have disappeared and Sabrina has negotiated them through a series of appalling foster homes, but now a crazy lady says she's their grandmother, but they don't have one, do they?

Book 2: The Unusual Suspects
The girls start school and plunge headfirst into a mystery when a teacher is found murdered

Book 3: The Problem Child
Red Riding Hood was driving clinically insane by the murder of her family by the Big Bad Wolf, and now she's escaped the asylum

Book 4: Once Upon A Crime
Location moves to New York City and the expatirate Everafter community, the hidden land of Faerie and some awkward truths about the girls' mother

Book 5: Magic and Other Misdemeanors
A number of magical items go missing and Sabrina and Daphne take on their first solo case

Book 6: Tales from the Hood
Mr Canis goes on trial for the Big Bad Wolf's crimes and the truth is to be found is in the mind of the clinically insane Red Riding Hood

Book 7: The Everafter War
Sabrina and Daphne's parents are awoken but there is no respite as reunions aren't happily ever afters and the leader of the Red Hand is finally revealed

Book 8: The Inside Story
Sabrina and Daphne pursue the Master through the bewildering pages of the Everafters' book of tales, stumbling through Oz and tale after tale in pursuit

http://sistersgrimm.com/newsite/index.html

At The Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald

A strange and at times quite lovely old tale of a little boy called Diamond, his father's horse, also called Diamond, and the boy's encounter with the North Wind who appears to him, usually in form of a beautiful large lady but who can shrink and grow and become more fearsome creatures.  A little heavy on the morals but it is a Victorian book

The Blindfold by Suri Hustvedt

The first time I read this book I really didn't like it, then I reread it and began to be enchanted. On one level it is the story of the coming of age of Iris Vegan, an intellectually intelligent but emotionally naive midwest girl come to New York to university. Like a little girl in a fairytale she meets a cast of characters on the streets and in the buildings of the urban jungle, the creepy obsessive Mr Morning, the too too cool Stephen and his artistic friends, Iris' professor lover and Iris' own transformation into a she/he wandering the seedier pits of the urban landscape and New York itself. Iris an literature student and she describes the world around her in first person narration through the filter of her heroines. Give it time and it will haunt you.