Enjoyable, imaginative retellings of classic tales—not for the nursery.
Fourteen fairy tales reworked for adults, by novelist Kasten.
Children are nightly lulled to sleep with fairy tales and fables in the hopes that the lessons imparted won’t fade with the dawn. Lessons about caution and selfishness but also self-preservation, revenge, insanity, patricide, incineration—all your basic kid stuff. This book revisits 14 such tales, giving each a fresh spin. The boy who cried wolf is now a grown man, a one-armed shepherd dealing with the consequences of his youthful transgressions. Close to madness from abandonment and starvation after their original tale, Hansel and Gretel plot to avoid future mistreatment by their soon-to-be stepmother. Beauty loves her Beast in spite of appearances, but she may find he can’t reciprocate when circumstances are reversed. Curious Baby Bear bites off more than he can chew when he removes a gun from his parents’ closet. Little Red Riding Hood sets out for grandmother’s house, but, distracted by the sensual pleasures of a secret meadow, she fails to reach the intended destination. This sharp yet charming collection of tales takes dead aim at human foibles and follies. Romantics beware: The ideal of eternal love is herein skewered, and the bloom quickly comes off the rose more than once. In dealings with the fairer sex, men behave cruelly, stupidly and only occasionally kindly. On a brighter note, a mistreated wife, once a virtual prisoner in her own home, becomes (post-husband) an empowered, enterprising businesswoman. Often the path in Wildwood winds unpredictably. One of the strongest stories, “The Magic Looking Glass,” explores the Evil Queen’s upbringing, pre–Snow White, and her fascination with a magic looking glass; its real-life, videolike scenes, rivaling those of satellite TV, induce a moral and spiritual catatonia as she becomes obsessed with beauty. Conversely, however, a lesser entry contrasting the perspectives of a duck and a swan misses the mark.
Enjoyable, imaginative retellings of classic tales—not for the nursery.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0983195955
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Kate Kasten
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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