The Witch

July 21, 2014
In this spooky, enthralling, and morally complex collection, National Book Award finalist Thompson (Who Do You Love) reimagines classic fairy tales, such as “Cinderella” and “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” as eight realistic narratives of family, sexuality, and faith. Announcing in a preface that she doesn’t aim to write “recountings or versions of the old tales but something looser,” Thompson sets all but one in the modern-day U.S. In each, she shows evil, wonder, and majesty—originally symbolized by witches, magical creatures, and fantastical kingdoms—as separate vectors of the divided self. In the title story, Hansel and Gretel are recast as foster children placed with an elderly woman whose crankiness one of them mistakes for malevolence, with tragic consequences. “Candy” locates innocence (such as Snow White’s) and cunning (such as Maleficent’s) in a single teenage girl, who oscillates between her identities as a self-conscious loner at school and a power-wielding temptress in online chat rooms. Thompson skillfully infuses our banal world of technology, reality TV, and pop psychology with genuine horror. Indeed, many of the entries—the Rapunzelesque “Your Secret’s Safe With Me,” in particular—are as eerie as anything you’ll find in the Brothers Grimm. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.

July 15, 2014
Fairy tales and folklore get clevermodern realist rewrites from National Book Award finalist Thompson (TheHumanity Project, 2013;The Year We Left Home, 2011, etc.).Domineering parents, wickedsiblings, wolves in sheep's clothing-Thompson recognizes that one reasoncenturies-old children's stories endure is because they're readily applicable toany era. These eight tales apply the tropes of stories like "Sleeping Beauty"to hardscrabble Midwestern settings, and Thompson doesn't feel beholden to thefamiliar plots; she uses them "only as a kind of scaffolding for new stories,"as she writes in the introduction. So the "prince" of "Inamorata" is a littleslow thanks to a childhood head injury, while his "Cinderella" left her clearLucite heels behind after a boozy party. The tendency of fairy tales tofeature trapped and imperiled young women is of particular interest toThompson. The teenage girl in "Candy," juggling an interest in boys whilecaring for her ailing grandmother, is just coming to recognize how hersexuality both empowers her and makes her vulnerable, and the endingbrilliantly complicates the notion of who's Little Red Riding Hood and who'sthe predatory wolf. "The Curse" and "Your Secret's Safe With Me" are effective"Rapunzel"-esque tales in which (respectively) an overprotective father andarrogant intellectual foolishly labor to shield women from the outside world.And in the closing "Prince," the strongest story of the batch, a mentallytroubled woman bullied by her sister is redeemed in part by the stray dog ofthe title. Not every story works: "Faith" is a thin riff on "The Pied Piper,"while "Three," in which three brothers can't save their divorced father fromthe blowsy, shallow would-be stepmom he's dating, sputters to a close.Still, the best stories areentertainingly inventive, doing more than just transposing contemporarycharacters onto familiar tales.

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September 1, 2014

National Book Award Finalist Thompson's (The Year We Left Home) latest work is a collection of reimagined fairy tales told in a realist style. She weaves in contemporary news and popular culture, and, as with most of the fairy-tale genre, there is more darkness than light. There is humor--in "Inamorata," Cinderella's slipper is now a clear plastic shoe with an "icicle spiked" heel--but more often she uses headline news to fuel the horror in the darker tales. The failing foster-care system in "The Witch" adds an extra layer of unease to the story of Hansel and Gretel while "The Curse" plays it straight until the very end when the eponymous curse is invoked. "Faith" is the only story in the collection that does not take place in the contemporary United States and is the weakest of the bunch. The lack of specificity may make it read more like a folktale, but this reviewer found it distracting. VERDICT Overall, these adaptations work well; they read like contemporary short stories yet harken back to the familiar as the origin stories are easily identified. Readers looking for modern fantasy retellings may be disappointed, but otherwise the collection should appeal to most readers. [See Prepub Alert, 3/31/14.]--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2014
Thompson's fiction (The Humanity Project, 2013) has always been firmly rooted in everyday experience, however transcendent her wit, insights, and imagination. And she retains that connection here as she performs shrewdly unnerving and bewitching improvisations on fairy tales. By channeling the old archetypal powers of these beloved classics into contemporary stories, Thompson creates a fresh and piquant form of narrative magic that has us reading with two minds, one searching hungrily for clues to which potent traditional plots she's riffing on, the other gobsmacked by the cunning of the all-too-realistic predicaments she creates for her flummoxed yet resilient characters. In The Witch, a young sister and brother are appallingly neglected by their low-life father, but after they wander off and get lost, things get worse as they battle a wicked foster mother. In Inamorata, brain-injury-impaired Royboy longs for love but can't remember who left a sexy shoe in his room. In clever, caring, funny, and wrenching stories about a famous public intellectual, a young English professor, a worried priest, an angry and seemingly vulnerable teenage girl, a somewhat mentally disabled woman, and a stray dog, Thompson recalibrates the fables of Bluebeard, the Pied Piper, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Frog Prince. Thompson's wizardly command is spellbinding, and her keen and unexpected revelations are, by turn and twist, grim and ebullient. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Thompson's avid fans will be onboard, along with readers drawn in by both a strong publicity campaign and the vast appeal of fairy tales.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)