Will I love A Tale Dark & Grimm?

As a fairytale enthusiast, I’m always looking for fresh takes, and A Tale Dark and Grimm is one of the best.

It brings back all the dark and gory parts of fairytales that adults have tried to soften or edit out over time. I’m talking heads and limbs chopped off, child abandonment, and frequent peril.

I am not a big horror fan, but Gidwitz somehow makes it more funny than frightening. The magic is in his voice; it’s not the story you tell, it’s how you tell it.

Gidwitz is a master storyteller, and I recommend all his books to… show more.

I read this a few years ago, thought it was cute, and moved on. I recently reread it on a much deeper dive, and I found a story that was so much more than it appeared initially.

Gidwitz’s humor is excellent—I laughed out loud reading this. But he also touches on so many themes that are present throughout fairy tales while not shying away from either the darkness or the light.

I loved the way he combined some of the lesser-known tales with Hansel and Gretel to make something that was more than any one story had been before. It… show more.

I love humor in stories (I even perform improv at a comedy theater in San Diego!), and this book is the funniest, quirkiest fairy tale retelling I’ve ever read. It is filled with dark humor and nods to the sometimes-gruesome source material, including cannibalism and children getting their heads chopped off (did you know you could get away with head-chopping in a children’s book and make it funny?!) and lots of warnings to the “little kids” that they better stop reading. Somehow, the book is able to remain lighthearted as Hansel and Gretel flee their own story and journey into… show more.