I have a confession to make . . . I don’t have much use for Neil Gaiman as far as full-length novels go. I KNOW. *dons sackcloth* *mortifies flesh*
I gave him a more than fair shot, but Neverwhere and The Graveyard Book both bored me to tears, I didn’t make it more than a few chapters into American Gods, and Stardust has the dubious honor of being the only movie that was actually better than the book.
BUT.
Give him a talented illustrator and tell him to write a new fairy tale (or anything fairy tale-like, really), and that man is a god.
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Take INSTRUCTIONS, for example. Technically, it’s a children’s picture book of, yes, instructions, for a fairy tale adventure, but it possesses a whimsy and free-spiritedness that will lighten any heart, young, old, and everything in between.
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The assumption that an adventure is forthcoming coupled with the willingness to shake the hand of said adventure are contagious.
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The feeling that I might stumble across a door in the hedge that I’d never noticed before persisted long after I’d finished the story, and in this world, anything that can resuscitate your belief in magic, is something worth reading for yourself, don’t you think?
As an adult, this single fact has fundamentally shaped my reading preferences. I love the darknessReviewed by: Rabid Reads
I was raised on fairytales.
As an adult, this single fact has fundamentally shaped my reading preferences. I love the darkness, the trick-cy faeness of the villains, the magicalness of the forest where almost all of these stories take place, and anytime I find a new story that embodies this kind of fairytaleness, I gleefully devour it.
I wasn't expecting THE LITTLE RED WOLF to be one such story when I received it, which seems kind of silly in hindsight . . . But at the time, I thought I was getting a typical role reversal-type retelling with oh-so-pretteh pictures.
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What I got was so much more.
What I got was the story of a tiny wolf sent to bring his grandmother a (dead) rabbit b/c too old to hunt for herself.
A (dead) rabbit that Tiny Wolf eats bit-by-delicious-bit, b/c exploring the woods can be exhausting.
But OH NO! He didn't mean to eat ALL of it. What's his grandmother going to think when he shows up empty handed? What will his parents think when they find out?
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Poor, poor Tiny Wolf.
Imagine his relief when a little girl appears and offers to help.
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So relieved that he completely forgets all the warnings his parents gave him about the hunter and his daughter.
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And that's where the stories diverge.
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I'd love to tell you how, truly, I would. It's dark and lovely and it hurts in the way that all the good stories do . . .
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But telling you would ruin it, and that is something I will never willfully do. Highly recommended to any fellow lover of fairytales.
Jessica ❁ ➳ Silverbow ➳ ❁
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