This hilariously dark adventure follows Hansel and Gretel as they fight and journey their way through multiple different elements of fairy tale stories. This story will shock, surprise and scare you as you learn the funnier, darker and gruesome versions of classic well known tales. With a witty and sarcastic narrator Hansel and Gretel’s story could not be more entertaining.
I give this book five stars (out of five). I absolutely loved this book! It’s amazing and is the first in a trilogy of great books with incredibly funny stories. The only way to accurately describe this book is just ‘total, utter chaos’. Imagine a movie that’s just a whole bunch of random people screaming and running around for like three hours, this is that but in book form. Random things happen for no reason and it still makes sense and is entertaining not frustrating.
The story follows Hansel and Gretel but is the polar opposite of a traditional fairy tale. That’s a very common theme in this series, taking the Disney version of stories and making them darker and funnier. Although this does look like a kid’s book, it has quite a lot of violence and is definitely for an audience with a certain type of humour, which I personally love. This focuses on the story of Hansel and Gretel but also includes many elements from other fairy tales and traditional common folklore, which I thought was genius and an amazing combination of storytelling.
I would summarize the plot but so much happens in each individual chapter it’s like it’s own story so it would take too long, and it would probably be a confusing waste of time when it would be much more worthwhile to just read the actual book.
One of my favourite things about this book is that this is the type of book where the narrator directly talks to the reader sometimes, there’ll be the story and in between paragraphs the narrator addresses the reader and talks or jokes about the story. This provides lots of the story’s comedy and is a great reminder that it’s ‘just a story’ when needed.
Another thing I really liked was after the story ended the author shared a few “personal” stories in the Acknowledgments. He talked about the people who introduced him to the Grimm fairy tales and the kids he teaches. I thought this was a very helpful and interesting inclusion because it gives readers more background information as to who he is as a person and also how he came to write the book the way he did.
Overall this book is one of my favourite books of all time and soon after reading this for the first time I went out to buy my own copy because this is just one of those stories that you need to keep close to you. I really recommend it to you as well as the sequel ‘In a Glass Grimmly’ and the rest of this trilogy.