HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

Traveling by coach across Denmark, an elderly Hans Christian Andersen recounts the story of his life to an inquisitive child, couching it as a fairy tale in which he learns to fly and inherits “the kingdom of letters.”

In this smoothly translated blend of biography and storytelling, Janisch uses Andersen’s own metaphor: The Danish writer called his memoir The Fairy Tale of My Life. Without weighting his story with specific detail (available in the author’s note), the author conveys a compelling sense of the man whose stories have been loved around the world and across centuries. Kastelic uses a variety of palettes and page designs to give this tale its wings. Both the journey and Andersen’s narrative are depicted mostly in panels—the present of the journey in light colors, the past in sepia tones. But the tales Andersen’s father reads to him as a boy and the stories the adult Andersen tells are brighter and shown in full pages. Repeated images of flight suggest that the writer-to-be escaped from a difficult childhood by immersing himself in the imagined world. In one striking spread the colors of the imagined world slightly bleed into young Hans’ arrival in Copenhagen. In another, storybook characters and even an elderly Andersen appear in a crowd scene of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Early on, readers see the shadow of Andersen’s wings, and, in a surprise conclusion, he shows he can still make his audience fly.

“A very special fairy story,” indeed.