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Summary
Summary
Writing in free verse honed to a wicked edge, the incomparable Ron Koertge brings dark and contemporary humor to twenty iconic fairy tales.
Once upon a time, there was a strung-out match girl who sold CDs to stoners. Twelve impetuous sisters escaped King Daddy's clutches to jiggle and cavort and wear out their shoes. A fickle Thumbelina searched for a tiny husband, leaving bodies in her wake. And Little Red Riding Hood confessed that she kind of wanted to know what it's like to be swallowed whole. From bloodied and blinded stepsisters (they were duped) to a chopped-off finger flying into a heroine's cleavage, this is fairy tale world turned upside down. Ron Koertge knows what really happened to all those wolves and maidens, ogres and orphans, kings and piglets, and he knows about the Ever After. So come closer -- he wants to whisper in your ear.
Author Notes
Ron Koertge is the author of many award-winning novels, including Stoner & Spaz and its sequel, Now Playing: Stoner & Spaz II; Shakespeare Bats Cleanup; Strays; Deadville; Margaux with an X; The Brimstone Journals; and The Arizona Kid. A two-time winner of the PEN Literary Award for Children's Literature, he lives in South Pasadena, California.
Andrea Dezsö is a visual artist and writer who works across a broad range of media. She is a full-time faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art and lives in New York City.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With sardonic wit and a decidedly contemporary sensibility, Koertge (Shakespeare Bats Cleanup) retells 23 classic fairy tales in free verse, written from the perspectives of iconic characters like Little Red Riding Hood, as well as maligned or minor figures such as the Mole from Thumbelina and Cinderella's stepsisters. For the princess from the Princess and the Pea, hypersensitivity isn't all that great ("A puppy licked me and I've still got a scar"), and the Little Match Girl appears in a poem with the rhythm of a rap song ("She's selling CDs on the corner,/ fifty cents to any stoner,/ any homeboy with a boner"). Several stories trade happily ever after for disappointment and discontent, as with the danger-addicted queen in Rumpelstiltskin, or with Rapunzel, who is left with a moody prince instead of the attentive witch who locked her in. Dezso's cut-paper Scherenschnitte-style silhouettes nod toward Hans Christian Andersen's own papercuts-if Andersen were creating a storyboard for the Saw franchise. From Bluebeard's beheaded wives to a bloody dismemberment in "The Robber Bridegroom," there are gruesome surprises throughout. A fiendishly clever and darkly funny collection. Ages 14-up. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
A much-honored poet and novelist retells, in free verse and from various points of view, twenty-three familiar tales (mostly Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault). With a contemporary sensibility and voice, Koertge pitches directly to teenagers. Beauty's Beast, though allowing that "her love...transformed me," is still nostalgic for the time when his teeth were fangs and Beauty "almost wanted / me to break her neck and open her / up like a purse." For the Ugly Duckling, "Grief is a street he skates down"; the swans, surrogate parents, beg, "Please don't go away like / that again. We were worried sick." There are several eager risk takers here, like the queen who outwits Rumpelstiltskin, then exits in a red cape, seeking a wolf. A few stories later, Red Riding Hood's condescending account to her mother is a perfect parody: "I'm into danger, / okay? What? You said to tell you the truth and be, like, frank." It's also a swell mix of the comical, concrete, and macabre: "Anyway, it's weird / inside a wolf, all hot and moist but no worse than flying / coach to Newark." Dezs's choice of cut-paper illustrations is brilliant, a nod to Hans C. Andersen's skill in that medium despite the radically different tone. Her stark silhouettes are peculiarly appropriate to such gruesome scenes as "The Robber Bridegroom" dismembering a bride, though the lurid gore is in a comfortably distancing black and white. Need to grab a restive class's attention? Seek no further. And take note: "Wolf" has the last word: "This is our forest...Perfect again when all your kind is dead." joanna rudge long (c) Copyright 2012. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Amputating the happily from ever after, Koertge's collection of free-verse poems wrings 23 old favorites into terse puddles of queasiness, grim endings, and ambiguous moral takeaways (which, to be fair, means they're not that far off from many of the originals). Not all the pieces land direct hits, but the best can be suggestively salacious, as when Cinderella's stepsisters recall, from the grave, how Even in tatters / Ella was desirable a little thigh showing / here, some soot at her cleavage. And what / a tease dashing away at midnight leaving / the heir to the throne groaning in his purple / tights. Or they can be downright twisted, like when Bluebeard's doomed bride discovers that she might just get off on being serial-killed or the vision of vengeful Hansel and Gretel, who don't stop with the witch in the woods. Laden with entrails, revealed bone stumps, and bushels of decapitated heads, Dezso's distinctive cut-paper silhouettes are dripping with grotesquery but also beautiful in their own indelible fashion. And they're a perfect match for Koertge's gritty, druggy, sexed-up visions.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IS there anything better than a smart retelling of a fairy tale - more rewarding than the way the familiar is juxtaposed with the unexpected, only adding to the story's power? A fairy tale retold well is always good for that joyful shiver of transgression. "Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses," by Ron Koertge, is a collection of familiar fairy tales, retold in blank verse with a bent toward the subversive. Beast laments his lost fangs; Red Riding Hood compares being swallowed up inside a wolf to flying coach to Newark; Ella runs away from the ball, leaving the prince "groaning in his purple tights." The language here is modern, brutal and sharp as a carving knife. The cut-paper silhouette illustrations, rendered by Andrea Dezso in black and red, are haunting and perfect. Here, it is the emotional lives of Koertge's characters that provide the element of surprise. In "Bluebeard," Bluebeard's newest wife finds herself disturbingly excited by danger. She wonders, in those last moments before her brothers rush in, whether she truly wants to be saved. And Rapunzel's mother, in "Rapunzel: A Story in Five Parts," laments asking her husband to steal greens from the witch because she can't stop wanting everything she can't have. Koertge is a master at getting to subtle and uncomfortable emotional truths and relaying them in just a few precise lines. Adam Gidwitz's "In a Glass Grimmly," the follow-up to his much lauded debut, "A Tale Dark & Grimm," strings together a single narrative from various retellings. This time we're following Jack, Jill and a three-legged talking frog called Frog through a succession of reconceived fairy tales. Each story flows into the next with humor, cleverness and an oddly absorbing realism. Gidwitz addresses the reader directly throughout, discussing our imagined objections and warning us - sometimes slightly too late - when things are about to get particularly nasty. Gidwitz plays fast and loose, with reality a springboard from which to reapproach age-old stories. A frog loses a leg rather than turning into a prince when hurled against a wall; "Mary had a little lamb" is just a taunt thrown at Jack for following around a boy named Marie; and the "magic" bean Jack buys with his family cow is nothing but a scam. In addition to subverted expectations, though, there's still magic aplenty, including the goblins from Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market." The more knowledge of fairy tales and nursery rhymes the reader brings to the book, the more Gidwitz's clever manipulations can be appreciated - as when Jack and Jill fall down a hill without a single direct reference to the rhyme itself. FAIRY tales and ghost stories are connected by the oral tradition, and often by a moral component, although ghost stories are expected to produce a more pronounced shiver and warning. If fairy tales describe outwitting the wolf or the witch or the stepmother, then ghost stories are about punishment, with evildoers getting what they deserve. "On the Day I Died," by Candace Fleming, is not strictly a retelling, though its use of familiar ghoststory motifs means it contains some of the pleasures of one. The book is a collection held together by a framing tale. When a boy tries to return a mysterious stranger's shoes, he's led to a graveyard where nine teenage ghosts tell him nine stories. Each one is set in a different time period, from the mid-19th century to the present, and each ends in the death of the narrator. In one, a girl from an Italian neighborhood in the 1960s has told so many lies that when she discovers the new boy at her school is an arsonist, no one will believe her. In another, a girl is forced to stay with an aunt who turns out to be hoarding not just junk, but also the heads of mobsters she once knew. In all, the ghosts are compelled to tell their stories because they need a living person as their audience. Acclaimed for her biographies "Amelia Lost" and "The Lincolns," among other books, Fleming has a real facility with historical fiction, which is evident here. She is at her best when recounting the rise and fall of Al Capone or the Midway Plaisance of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Monkeys' paws, walking corpses and murderous mirrors remain less carefully drawn. That all the stories here are about a death forces certain similarities, but each one is made new by the particularities of its deceased narrator. It made me think about the ways all stories are retold, and how the most successful stories are those that manage to give us that jolt of surprise alongside a resonance of the familiar that echoes all the way down to our bones. Holly Black is the author of "The Spiderwick Chronicles."
School Library Journal Review
Gr 7 Up-It's not so happy in Ever After-at least not in Koertge's verses, which skew and skewer traditional fairy tales. Cinderella's stepsisters ("We have names, by the way. She's Sarah/and I'm Kathy.") are understandably disgruntled, but wouldn't you expect Rapunzel to be satisfied? Not so: ".I love my daughter. But the prince is moody and thinks/of himself. While the witch thought only of me." These characters have pretty modern sensibilities; the Little Match Girl is selling CDs, warming herself on their lyrics; Red Riding Hood rattles, "Fine, fine, fine. Do you want to hear this story or not? Good./So I'm in the woods and I hear footsteps or, like, pawsteps.." The poems beg to be shared aloud, like the best gossip. The sensibilities are wry, often dark, and the language is occasionally earthy. Dezso's cut-paper illustrations extend the eldritch mix of folkloric material and macabre interpretations. This slim volume is at once simple and sophisticated, witty and unnerving.-Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Library, NY (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Short, brisk vignettes flip traditional fairy tales onto their backs. Twenty-three rewritings disclose dark secrets. Although each ostensibly has its own narrator, a lascivious narrative tone runs throughout. Dezs matches that tone with black cut-out silhouettes of death and dismemberment, breasts unobscured. Incest recurs, as does kinky sexuality. Red Riding Hood, one example of the latter, reveals, "I was totally looking / forward to that part. With the wolf and all. I'm into danger, / okay?" Kink is rarely acknowledged in teen literature; it's unfortunate that these tales are too abrupt to address the topic meaningfully. The line-breaks of Koertge's free verse seem gratuitous. Sexual imagery includes both children (Hansel and Gretel "eat and eat, filling up the moist recesses / of their little bodies") and projected rape-fantasy (the Beast claims that Beauty "almost wanted / me to break her neck and open her / up like a purse"). Descriptions are incomprehensibly flip ("Oh, her skin is white as Wonder bread, / her little breasts like cupcakes!") or harsh ("a beautiful girlnot the usual chicken head ho"). The voice dances from incongruous humor ("it's weird inside a wolf, / all hot and moist but no worse than flying coach to Newark") to modernity forced into fairy-tale diction ("She'd slept over at their hovels"). Will catch some eyes, but this feels like edginess for edginess's sake, no deeper. (Fractured fairy tales. 14 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
