Gretel and the Dark

Gretel in the Dark
By Eliza Granville
2014
Riverhead Books
ISBN: 978-1-59463-255-6
Hardcover
Impulse buy at Joseph Beth, Date unrecorded
Stamped and keeping forever

I love fairy tales. I love them more as an adult when I am free to know that the original fairy tale stories are far darker and more gruesome than those that I was familiar with as a child. I love the casual magic. I love how adaptations and retellings of fairy tales help us to see the universality of human stories.

Gretel in the Dark is a beautiful example of an adaptation of fairy tales to a human story that is hard to talk about. In it, we alternate between the story of Lillie, a mystery woman who claims to be a machine on a mission to kill a monster in late 19th century Vienna, and Krysta, a young girl who ends up in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. It is unclear at the beginning how these two stories are connected, but both are compelling.

I found the beginning of the book a little difficult to get though, at first I wasn't sure where either of the stories were going, and I found Krysta to be a singularly unappealing narrator in the first couple of chapters in her voice. However, it was worth the work to get into it, because once I got involved in the story I was completely consumed. I couldn't put it down.

The beauty of this book is in what is not said. Once you get over the fact that Krysta is initially an unlikable child, the fact that the horrors of the concentration camp are represented only though her incompletely comprehending eyes make them all the more visceral and disturbing. The sense of magic, covert and just beneath the surface, leaves you wondering if you are just seeing this story with the innocence of a child, or if you are in a parallel universe where the rules are just slightly different. As the parallels between the two tales emerge, you wonder who has cast the spell that makes them both possible.

And in the end, you are left a deep sense of storytelling as a driver of humanity. As a way of understanding both the horrors and triumphs of our complicated lives. As a uniquely human magic with a real and significant power.

2016 is a young year, but I have a sense that this one is going to stick with me. I wouldn't be surprised if it's on my best reads of the year list come December.