Grimm's Last Fairytale Book

In Grimm's Last Fairytale it is September 1863 and professor Jacob Grimm is 78, visiting with Auguste, the daughter of his now deceased brother Willi, the places he knew as a young man. Around an elliptical retelling of Sleeping Beauty, past and present interweave: Jacob and his relationship with Auguste and her growing attraction to their servant Kummel; the lifelong devotion between Jacob and Willi; the collecting of their famous Grimm's Fairytales; the brother's love for Auguste's mother, Dortchen."Neither now nor ever shall I leave you". And once he had told her, without explaining why, that the line meant a great deal to him too, from even before she was born.Tears ran down her cheeks.Story, story, story,she thought. With crushing self-consciousness she made herself smile, then said, "I want to know my own story. You used to say that everyone has a story."Haydn Middleton has previously chronicled Arthurian legend in the Mordred cycle. Here, in making key to a book in which time is as unreliable as Germany's tangled forests, the power of remembered stories to remake the world, his narrative will appeal equally to those enchanted by Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood as Lindsay Clarke's The Chymical Wedding. With the enigmatic quality of a dream, Grimm's Last Fairytale is beautifully written and emotionally tense; that Jacob's liberal dream for a peaceful unified Germany is shadowed by premonitions of the Holocaust lends a further edge to an already compelling and sometimes breathtaking fiction. --Gary S. DalkinRead More