If you just search for the title on Amazon, you don’t get this book until somewhere after the 10th page of results, and it’s on the 4th page if you search just books. That’s just sad, because it’s really a good book. Well this one starts off sad, doesn’t it? We start with a young woman, Saville, traveling with her father to a new city away from her mother’s grave. And her father is an ass. He is a tailor who somehow sews things differently? […]
Fairy tale update with a Latinx spin
Technically it’s a misleading to say this is an update of a fairy tale. Really, this is a reimagining of several, woven together with a Latinx flair and a contemporary openness to LGBTQIA sensibilities. If that sounds like a lot to pack into 375 pages, you aren’t wrong, but I think it’s a decent effort. Blanca & Roja tells the story of the del Cisne sisters, one of whom is destined by a family curse to become a swan. Told from four perspectives, this book […]
If you love fairy tales
I’ve always enjoyed fairy tales and became a bit obsessed once I discovered the darker original Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson collections. This book evokes those tales but the stories have been spun in different and interesting directions, in part because it was created as a volume of fairy tales that the characters in the Grishaverse (the world setting Leigh Bardugo created) would know. In 2012 Leigh’s publisher asked if she would write a prequel story for her first novel Shadow and Bone. But instead […]
A promising start for a new author
So, we have Alice and her mother Ella living a fairly transient lifestyle. They seem to constantly run in to bad luck. Things catch fire, or strange things happen, and Alice even gets kidnapped once. Ella’s mother, Althea, is an author of a book, Tales from the Hinterland. It’s a book of dark fairy tales that is no longer published, but has a fanatical cult following. It’s also a book that Alice has never read, despite her efforts to find a copy. One day they […]