Pirates and treasure and ugly fruit and heroes and islands and ocean adventure, oh, my! Yeah, it doesn’t quite have the rhythm and swing I’d like it to have, and neither does this book. But for a pirate story aficionado, Deadweather and Sunrise might do the trick.

Deadweather and Sunrise is billed as Book 1 of the Chronicles of Egg. In the story, the aforementioned Egg lives on Deadweather Island with his abusive father and two siblings who also mistreat him. They all live together on an ugly fruit plantation until on a trip to nearby Sunrise Island, Egg’s family disappears and Egg is left in the care of the very rich Pembroke family: mother, father, and spoiled, sheltered daughter, Millicent. Egg crushes on Millicent; someone tries to kill Egg, and the adventure begins.

There’s a possible treasure to be found, and there are pirates, either to defeat or to enlist as allies. Not everything or everyone is to be taken at face value. As Egg very wisely learns, “”[N]ot everyone who lives on a pretty street is a good person, and . . . even in the rottenest places you might find someone you can trust with your life.”

I think this book might be one of those things that shouldn’t be immediately devalued or written off. The story has potential not only to “grow on” the reader with time for reflection but also to get even better in the next book(s) in the series. Egg’s supporting cast is made up of thieves and rogues and mostly unreliable people, but Egg himself is a kind of Oliver Twist character transported to a mythical South Sea island world.

Recommend to those who like pirate stories, Dickensian fantasy worlds, or poverty-stricken boy heroes.

There are (at least) two approaches to the recasting of old tales for children–anything from fairy tales to Chaucer to Shakespeare to even the stories of the Bible. Because these stories were not necessarily written (or told) for children, they sometimes contain dark, very dark, material –blood and violence and illicit sex and senseless mayhem and other things that are just nasty or repulsive and not terribly uplifting or useful to educate or grow or even entertain young minds.

Of course, if an author wants to re-tell a story that contains disturbing elements for a young audience, it can be bowdlerized. “Thomas Bowdler was an English physician and philanthropist, best known for publishing The Family Shakspeare, an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare’s work, edited by his sister Henrietta Maria Bowdler, intended to be more appropriate for 19th century women and children than the original.” (Wikipedia, Thomas Bowdler) Bowdlerization has been denigrated, unjustifiably in my opinion, but it’s done all the time. As Mr. Gidwitz says in his introduction to In a Glass Grimmly, “Once upon a time, fairy tales were horrible. . . strange, bloody, and horrible.” And almost all of the storytellers since then have downplayed or bowdlerized the bloody, gruesome, unpalatable parts of the fairy tales they were telling—for the sake of the children and even the adults who are reading.

Some would say that the older the audience the more unjustified the omissions and changes are. However, an author or storyteller who is spinning his own story made up of elements of old tales has the right to pick and choose the elements he thinks will make for the strongest and most artistic story. Some of the darker elements, especially for an older audience, may make the story stronger and more meaningful or they may just make it it stupid or repugnant, as in the example that Mr. Gidwitz also shares of how Cinderella’s step-sisters actually sliced off parts their feet to make them fit into the glass slipper. I can’t imagine how that little detail would improve the story unless you’re doing a meditation on self-injury and cutting.

So, anyway, one direction to go is to cut out the nasty parts. The other approach is to play up the nastiness: describe in great and excruciating detail how Jack the giant killer eviscerated the giant and just how the blood and vomit mixed on the floor and how utterly revolting and disgusting the entire scene was. Use phrases such as “the steaming, putrid pool rippled” or “spilling his blood and viscera and porridge” or “a burbling swamp of (stomach) acid” (actual phrases from In a Glass Grimmly, and not the most revolting ones), and maybe because you used descriptive, mature vocabulary words in your middle grade fantasy novel, people will ooh and aah and say how well-written the novel is.

In a Glass Grimmly takes the well-written but disgusting approach, and not to good effect. I waded, or at least skimmed, through all the blood and vomit in giant-land, and I was not impressed. The descriptions are vivid, and I suppose, well-written, but the chapters are sort of disconnected, and the narrator is intrusive and annoying. I hate books that seem to say, “Oh, kids like gross, nasty, slimy stuff. Let’s take the really loathsome parts of this tale and make them the centerpiece of the narrative because that will draw the kids in.”

There was a bit of redeeming value towards the end of the book, but it wasn’t enough to make up for all the gratuitous blood, gore, guts, and puke that came before. When the narrator actually says, “Ooooh, you won’t like this part. You might want to put the book down now,” then it’s supposed to make me feel contrary enough to go ahead and read anyway? It’s kind of like saying, “I double dog dare you!” But it made me feel SO contrary that I wanted to close the book immediately because I knew the author/narrator didn’t really want me to quit reading. I think many (most?) kids are smart enough to get the same message.

About the only thing I did enjoy while reading In a Glass Grimmly was trying to figure out which fairy tale each part of the story came from, but I thought it meandered quite a bit. And it isn’t the “darkness” of the book or of its original sources that I’m complaining about. Guts and vomit aren’t really dark; they’re just foul and I think, pandering.

If this review makes you want to read the book even more than you did before, you are the intended audience. Have fun.

“In most fairy tales, princesses are beautiful, dragons are terrifying, and stories are harmless. This isn’t most fairy tales.”

What a terrible, transformative, true (in the best sense of the word) book.

Iron Hearted Violet is a story about an ugly but beloved princess who lives in a “mirrored world” where for time immemorial the thirteenth-god-who-is-never-named-aloud has been imprisoned for the protection of the multiverse from his destructive and evil tendencies. However, Violet’s world, and indeed the entire multiverse, created by the other twelve gods, is in imminent danger of being taken over by the evil Nybbas (who should never be named).

It’s a story about sin and pride and the desire for power and worship of ourselves and also about love and loyalty and true beauty. The book dares to say things that are counter-cultural and also run counter to the usual fantasy tale tropes:

“There are other ways to be brave without demonstrating it with the sword. Most battles are won by changing minds and turning hearts. Sometimes that’s all the bravery you need.”

“A real princess engages with the world in a state of grace. It is with grace that she listens and with grace that she speaks. A princess loves her people, no matter what their birth or station. Even ugly jailers.”

“Love [is] sharp and hot and dangerous. . . Love transforms our fragile, cowardly hearts into hearts of stone, hearts of blade, hearts of hardest iron. Because love makes heroes of us all.”

This book has a “Hobbit feel” to it, not in the plot or the characters (although there is a dragon), but in the flow of the story and in its moral universe and in its message. Small, unlovely things and people can have great significance. In fact, an ugly princess and her stable-boy best friend and an old, fear-filled dragon might be both the betrayers and the saviors of the world.

Two things I didn’t like about the book:
1. The pictures of Violet in the beginning of the book and on the cover, where she is supposed to be ugly, show a cute little girl with beautiful curly hair and lovely features. She is described:

“Her left eye was visibly larger than her right. . . Her nose pugged, her forehead was too tall, and even when she was just a baby, her skin was freckled and blotched, and no number of milk baths or lemon rubs could unmark her. People remarked about her lack of beauty.”

Just as it happens in the story itself when the storyteller/narrator tells Violet to make her story princesses beautiful to please the listeners, the illustrator (or someone) couldn’t resist making Violet pretty instead of showing her in all her asymmetrical, wild, and unattractive glory.

2. The impotence and limited-ness of “the gods.” There are twelve gods in this story who are said to have created the multiverse and saved it from deadly peril, but are now remote, removed and “still learning.” These gods are not omnipotent, not omniscient, and actually rather like benevolent gods of a clockwork multiverse, set in motion and left to function on its own. One of the gods, the “runty god”, does intervene but in a rather ineffective way.

Nevertheless, those two failings are outweighed by far by the lovely story-telling and surprising plot developments and outstanding characters and themes of Iron Hearted Violet. I recommend it for lovers of fantasy and princess books.

Yawn.

I really like Diane Stanley’s beautifully written and illustrated picture book biographies of famous historical figures such as Joan of Arc, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter the Great and others. And Brown Bear Daughter and I both enjoyed her fairy tale fantasy Cinderella story, Bella at Midnight. But The Cup and the Crown, a sequel to The Silver Bowl (which I haven’t read), just wasn’t up to snuff in comparison to the biographies or to Bella.

Molly’s friend King Alaric asks her to find a Loving Cup for him, a magical cup with the “power to bind two souls together for life, to bless their children and their children’s children down through the generations.” He needs the cup to make a neighboring princess fall in love with him and thereby gain a strategic alliance for the kingdom. Strike one against this story. I didn’t care if Molly ever found the cup or not, given the rather mercenary purpose of her quest.

Molly, accompanied by several friends and companions, travels to the north in search of the cup, and lead by a magical raven, they discover a hidden city where no one is allowed to enter lest they give the secret location of the rich and powerful city of Harrowsgode. But Molly is allowed in by an inhabitant who should know better, and then she is imprisoned so that she can never leave and give away the secret. Strike two. Why did Master Pieter let Molly in? Even more to the point, why did Master Pieter let her friend Tobias in when he knew that Tobias’ life would be forfeit?

Then, by hard work and a little magic, Molly and Tobias manage to escape, someone makes them a Loving Cup, and they all live happily ever after—maybe. Strike three. I made it all the way through the book, but I was not rewarded with a very satisfying ending. I think there’s a third book in the series yet to come.

Do you know that game where you sit in a circle and tell a story, each person breaking off at a critical moment to let the next person add to the story? This book felt like that kind of round robin story, only incorporating two stories in alternating chapters instead of just one. Maybe imagine two concentric circles and the story-telling, of two separate stories, goes around the circles in opposite directions–nah, that’s too confusing.

Wendy Mass wrote 11 Birthdays and Finally, two books I really liked. And she’s written some other fairy tale take-offs in the Twice Upon a Time series that includes this version of Beauty and the Beast. I haven’t read the others in the series, but I just couldn’t enjoy this one very much. I kept wondering when the “Beauty” chapters and the “Beast” chapters were going to converge, and then when they finally did about three-fourths of the way through the book, I just didn’t believe.

SPOILER, I guess. We have a wicked witch in this story who turns people into insects (and other animals). The insects, an ant and a grasshopper, then live for many, many years. I looked it up. Ants and grasshoppers don’t live that long, although I suppose enchanted insects could be different.

Tag line: The story of Beauty and the Beast like you’ve never heard it before.

That’s a true statement, but my problem is that I liked the way I heard it before better.
There’s Beauty or Rose Daughter both by Robin McKinley or Beast by Donna Jo Napoli or even the Disney movie of the story. This version just feels impromptu and implausible.

Other voices:
It didn’t work for Charlotte either.
Angie at Bibliophile Support Group was bored.
I didn’t find any other reviews. If you have a different take, please let us know in the comments.