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Summary
Summary
"If this isn't the definitive edition of Hansel and Gretel , it's absolutely necessary."-- Kirkus Reviews , starred review
Best-selling author Neil Gaiman and fine artist Lorenzo Mattotti join forces to create Hansel & Gretel , a stunning book that's at once as familiar as a dream and as evocative as a nightmare. Mattotti's sweeping ink illustrations capture the terror and longing found in the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Gaiman crafts an original text filled with his signature wit and pathos that is sure to become a favorite of readers everywhere, young and old.
Neil Gaiman is the best-selling author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio, theater, and films for children and adults alike. His work has received many international awards, including the Newbery and Carnegie Medals, as well as Hugos, two Nebulas, a World Fantasy Award, four Bram Stoker Awards, six Locus Awards, and countless other honors. He is a pillar of modern fantasy writing. He has said that the story of Hansel and Gretel is what made him want to be a writer.
Lorenzo Mattotti is an Italian comics and graphic artist living in Paris. A frequent contributor of covers for the New Yorker , he's recognized as one of the most outstanding international exponents of comics art. Mattotti won an Eisner Award for his graphic novel Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde . He collaborated with Lou Reed in re-imaging Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven .
Author Notes
Neil Gaiman was born in Portchester, England on November 10, 1960. He worked as a journalist and freelance writer for a time, before deciding to try his hand at comic books. Some of his work has appeared in publications such as Time Out, The Sunday Times, Punch, and The Observer. His first comic endeavor was the graphic novel series The Sandman. The series has won every major industry award including nine Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, three Harvey Awards, and the 1991 World Fantasy Award for best short story, making it the first comic ever to win a literary award.
He writes both children and adult books. His adult books include The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which won a British National Book Awards, and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel for 2014; Stardust, which won the Mythopoeic Award as best novel for adults in 1999; American Gods, which won the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, SFX, and Locus awards; Anansi Boys; Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances; and The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction, which is a New York Times Bestseller. His children's books include The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish; Coraline, which won the Elizabeth Burr/Worzalla, the BSFA, the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Bram Stoker awards; The Wolves in the Walls; Odd and the Frost Giants; The Graveyard Book, which won the Newbery Award in 2009 and The Sandman: Overture which won the 2016 Hugo Awards Best Graphic Story.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. Master storyteller Gaiman (The Graveyard Book) plumbs the dark depths of Hansel and Gretel, imagining the pair's mother scheming to abandon them ("Two dead are better than four dead,"¿ she tells their father. "That is mathematics, and it is logic"¿) and reveling in the witch's cruelty. "Today, when the oven is hot enough, we will roast your brother,"¿ she announces to Gretel. "But do not be sad. I will give you his bones to chew, little one."¿ Italian illustrator Mattotti contributes elegant b&w ink spreads that alternate with spreads of text. His artistry flows from the movement of his brush and the play of light and shadow. The witch's house, tiled with baroque decorations and topped with a graceful tower, is unexpectedly beautiful; light pours through the barley sugar windows. The absence of color is a foil for Gaiman's panoply of words: "gloves and hats of travelers, and coins of cold and of silver, a string of pearls, chains of gold and chains of silver."¿ Gaiman makes the story's horrors feel very real and very human, and Mattotti's artwork is genuinely chilling. Ages 7-10. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Gaiman retells the classic Grimm tale to accompany a set of paintings by Italian graphic artist Mattotti. The narration is as dark as the India-ink art. Double-page spreads of text alternate with full-bleed paintings, in which the humans are dwarfed by menacing shadows. Older readers with a taste for the macabre will enjoy this version of the tale. Bib. (c) Copyright 2015. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
The classic Grimm fairy tale gets a macabre makeover in this illustrated retelling. On simple, well-designed pages of just text, Gaiman tells a fairly standard version of Hansel and Gretel. And while the story is unsettling enough on its own, it's Mattotti's full-bleed india ink illustrations that dial up the creep factor. After each pair of pages of Gaiman's straightforward story comes a double-page illustration full of ominous, sweeping swaths of black brushstrokes with mere hints of figures and backgrounds. Hansel and Gretel become tiny silhouettes amid looming, streaky tree trunks, while on another spread, their father's frantic eye and upraised ax are all that's visible amid the shadows. Mattotti masterfully and subtly uses negative space so each image isn't immediately noticeable, like the most menacing game of hide-and-seek, and the abrupt oscillation between the clean, white pages of words and the silent, chilling dusky pictures is striking. While this isn't a graphic novel per se, Gaiman's fans and lovers of visual storytelling will devour this eerie version of a classic. Also available in an oversize deluxe edition. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: New York Times best-seller, award winner, cult favorite Gaiman is the triple threat of the book world, and his many fans will want a taste of this one, too.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WRITTEN WITH a devastating spareness by Neil Gaiman and fearsomely illustrated in shades of black by Lorenzo Mattotti, the newest version of "Hansel and Gretel" astonishes from start to finish. It doesn't hurt that the book itself is a gorgeous and carefully made object, with a black floral motif on its pages' decorated borders, along with abundant red drop caps and tall, round gray page numbers. (Published by Toon Books, the New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly's venture into richly illustrated books for children, it comes in two formats, with an oversize one that includes an afterword about the evolution of the tale.) All the well-chosen detail provides an ideal backdrop for what Gaiman and Mattotti have done with the Grimm Brothers' familiar story of the two siblings who, after being abandoned by desperate parents, outwit their witchy captor. Their rendition brings a freshness and even a feeling of majesty to the little tale. Some great, roiling essence of the human condition - our fate of shuttling between the darkness and the light - seems to inhabit its pages. In Gaiman's hands, the humble woodcutter's decision to abandon his children speaks not just to the cruelty that surfaces during desperate times, but to the needless suffering and waste of war. At first, the woodcutter, his wife and their children live simply but happily. Their rural life is not romanticized - the mother can be "bitter and sharp-tongued," while the father is "sometimes sullen and eager to be away from their little home" - but Hansel and Gretel can count on "freshly baked bread and eggs and cooked cabbage on their table." Then war arrives, bringing soldiers, "hungry, angry, bored, scared men who, as they passed through, stole the cabbages and the chickens and the ducks." The family's misery is measured by their growing hunger and the emptying out of their once bustling village, until the awful choice of eliminating the children arises. Gaiman has chosen to make the father a sympathetic, hapless character, bullied by their mother into sending the children off to their certain deaths in the woods. "It would be a monstrous thing to do, to kill our children," the father says. "Lose them, not kill them," the mother replies. In the Grimms' original version, the book's afterword explains, both parents agree that the children must be sacrificed. Then came later editions in which the mother alone is heartless. By the mid-19th century it was a stepmother who ordered the father to get rid of the children, and that's the way most of us today know the story. Gaiman's middle ground strikes just the right note of horror - a mother who would kill her children seems infinitely worse than a stepmother who makes the same calculation, yet having both parents plotting to off their offspring pushes the brutality too far toward hopeless despair rather than delicious terror. Gaiman's witch is wonderfully underplayed, more a blunt, shortsighted, badtempered old woman than the cackling banshee type. Inside the gingerbread house, her table is laden with "cakes and pies and cookies, with bread and with biscuits," but she apologizes that there is no meat. War and famine have affected even the witches, it seems: These days, she reports, "often no game would come to her trap from one year to another, and what she did catch was too scrawny to eat and needed to be fattened up first." When she deposits the drugged, sleeping Hansel into the cage to fatten him up in order to eat him, she utters only one word: "'Meat,' she said happily." Hunger is, of course, the dark drumbeat of the tale, and Gaiman notches up the volume, reminding at every turn that hunger makes us all helpless animals and potential cannibals, unable to think straight. As the starving children begin eating the gingerbread house, they let "the spicy gingerbread fill their mouths, their heads, their stomachs." In the end, when Hansel and Gretel are reunited with their father, he reports that "each day he had searched for them in the forest," and you believe it. Gaiman, who has won every award a writer with a taste for the dark and fantastical can win (Hugo, Nebula, Newbery), ends on an unequivocal high note, reminding us that horror is best wielded along with some small possibility of brightness. He spends a moment to draw out his description of the siblings' well-deserved future prosperity, evoking the scene at both Hansel's and Gretel's weddings: Both "married well," and at the celebrations the moon looks down "kindly." The food is plentiful, the pleasure gotten from it primal: "The fat from the meat ran down their chins." At the beginning, Mattotti's illustrations, all of them two-page spreads, pull you inexorably into their dark, menacing swishes, with just small patches of white visible here and there, like tiny beams of light into a prison cell. But when the children and their father are reunited, he offers a final spread that shows the family frolicking outside their house against a generous stretch of pure whiteness. It's a moment of terribly hard-won joy, the best kind. MARIA RUSSO is the children's books editor of the Book Review.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 4 Up-In 1812, the Brothers Grimm published the story of "Hansel and Gretel," about a brother and sister who must survive abandonment by their parents and being captured by a hungry witch. In 2007, Mattotti created compelling black-and-white artwork for the fairy tale. This exhibit inspired Gaiman to write his own version, and Mattotti's images and Gaiman's text are combined in this book. While not in the traditional graphic novel format, this illustrated short story alternates between images and words, allowing for full spreads of the artist's drawings, punctuated by intermittent spreads of text. There is no question that Gaiman is an incredibly gifted wordsmith, and his retelling hearkens back to the Grimms's original narrative. The most inspirational part of this book is Mattotti's artwork. Pitch-black India ink is used to great effect, creating dark and terrifying landscapes that threaten to envelop the tiny figures of the children. An extensive note on the history of the tale's origins is included as back matter. Mattotti's amazing work will inspire a new generation of readers, and this volume will give chills. The oversize deluxe edition features a die-cut cover.- Andrea Lipinski, New York Public Library (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
If this isn't the definitive edition of "Hansel and Gretel," it's absolutely necessary. It would be easy for readers to believe that Mattotti drew these pictures while listening to a storyteller by firelight, as if he grabbed a piece of charcoal straight out of the ashes, because he needed to draw the characters right away. The truth may be even more amazing. The pictures were inspired by a Metropolitan Opera production of the Humperdinck favorite, and the thick patches of ink contain five different colors, though the effect is of enveloping blackness. The swirling lines look as though they might start moving if seen at just the right moment. The pictures have inspired Gaiman to write some of his most beautiful sentences, direct and horrifying: "If you do not eat," says the woodcutter's wife, "then you will not be able to swing an axe. And if you cannot cut down a tree, or haul the wood into the town, then we all starve and die." The wordless double-page spreads alternate with text-filled spreads, with lines set generously apart and framed by delicate flowers. A deluxe version, about half again as big, features a die-cut cover but is otherwise equally, spectacularly understated. The Grimm version is as frightening as a bedtime story gets, but this version will scare people in new ways, and some of those people may need to start drawing right away. (historical notes) (Picture book/fairy tale. 7-12) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
