Review by New York Times Review
AS A CHILD, I thought the Grimm fairy tales were written, whole cloth, by a bunch of creepy brothers with dark imaginations. It seemed likely that they lived deep in a forest, and more than likely that they had long, untidy beards. They were probably hoarders, and what they hoarded was probably bones. With a name like Grimm, and stories like that, what else could you expect? But I was confusing the Grimms with the tales. Untidy beards? Far from it: In contemporary portraits, these men were clean shaven, with the loose, wavy hair of the Romantic era they embodied. Highly educated (though poor), Jacob and his younger brother Wilhelm had a mission: to define Germany - then fractured into principalities and under Napoleon's odious rule - to itself. They accomplished this by compiling a German dictionary and collecting a trove of oral-tradition fairy and folk tales, gathered with the help of family friends, many of them young women. (Wilhelm later married one of his story gatherers, the charmingly named Dorothea Wild.) These brothers weren't hoarders - they were heroes. Because the Grimms wanted to celebrate German culture, they made changes - over the course of seven editions - to weed out foreign influences and reflect their own moral values. The tales have never ceased evolving, interpreted again and again by writers and artists who saw something - perhaps worrisome, perhaps delightful - that they wanted to explore. Two new books, "The Singing Bones," by the Australian author and illustrator Shaun Tan ("The Arrival," "Rules of Summer"), and "Snow White," by the American graphic novelist Matt Phelan ("Bluffton," "The Storm in the Barn"), take unexpected approaches to the tales and come up with something new for readers past the age for picture books. Much of what we know about the Grimms comes from the work of the fairy tale scholar and translator Jack Zipes. In an introduction to "The Singing Bones," Zipes writes that if it if hadn't been for illustrations, the tales would never have become popular. When the Grimms first published them without pictures in 1812, sales were sluggish; it was only when they saw a successful English translation with drawings by the satirist George Cruikshank that they realized illustrations would allow them to reach a wider readership. "The Singing Bones" definitely tips the balance of art-to-text toward illustration: Tan gives his readers only a few sentences from each of 75 stories, accompanied by a full-page photograph of his starkly lit sculptures. The best of these, often in the red, black and white palette we associate with the tales, have a look reminiscent of Inuit art; they appear simplified and smoothed by many hands. Their scale is hard to gauge. They seem simultaneously monumental and small enough to tuck in a pocket, like Japanese netsuke. As the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman puts it in his introduction, Tan "makes me want to pick them up, inspect them from unusual angles, feel the heft and weight of them. He makes me wonder what damage I could do with them, how badly I could hurt someone if I hit them with a story." Gaiman (whose clever, feminist reworking of "Sleeping Beauty" was illustrated in a quite literal style by Chris Riddell) makes a strong case for Tan's approach: The sculptures "are, in themselves, stories: not the frozen moments in time that a classical illustration needs to be. These are something new, something deeper." "The Singing Bones" is recommended for children ages 12 and up, and some children and teenagers, no longer charmed by beautiful picture books, will be intrigued by Tan's suggestive, shadowy forms. His sculptures can be funny: Rumpelstiltskin looks like a red Mayan sun, dancing sideways with his long tongue pointing in one direction and his long nose in another. They can also be frightening. In "The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About Fear," a figure sits reading, oblivious to a row of hanged bodies next to him. In "The Old Man and His Grandson," a child peers into a monster's gaping maw, from which huge hands and crooked teeth protrude. Though terror is a crucial component of fairy tales, Tan's tableaus are presented in isolation, not within a story structured to come around to a happy ending. Perhaps children who are drawn to the images will be interested enough to seek out the complete stories in some other volume. But the readers who will get the most from "The Singing Bones" are Grimm specialists - like Zipes and Gaiman - who've read even the more obscure stories and can focus on Tan's artistry. MATT PHELAN SETS his graphic retelling of "Snow White" in 1920s New York, with both its Ziegfeld Follies glamour and its impoverished Dead End Kids. Arranging the story in wide horizontal panels, Phelan sets aside the pastel colors of his earlier graphic novels and, using what appears to be pencil and ink, adapts his palette to the Grimms' description of his heroine, "who was as white as snow, as red as blood," with "hair as black as ebony." This gives it the look of a black-and-white movie, a genre Phelan loves: "Bluffton" was, in part, about the young Buster Keaton. As with Tan's book, familiarity with the original tale will help readers enjoy Phelan's innovations. The Grimms' softhearted hunter becomes the stony-faced hit man Mr. Hunt; Snow White's father is no longer royal, but he is "King of Wall Street." Her stepmother is as evil as ever, with Louise Brooks's haircut and the deep cleavage of a showgirl on the make. The big surprise is the dwarves: They're a scruffy, diverse band of boys so toughened by life on the streets that they won't even tell Snow their names, identifying themselves only as "The Seven." Though Phelan does incorporate some dialogue, he has a cinematographer's gift for telling emotional stories without words. While I admire that skill, it's hard not to miss the incantatory language of the Grimms' "Snow White" - one of the best written of the tales - especially when it comes to the stepmother's conversations with her mirror. It's fun for children to recite the repeated rhymes of "Mirror, mirror, on the wall...." Here, she gets her information from a ticker tape, which spits out disjointed, monosyllabic messages in between stock prices. But rather than hoping that every new version of the Grimm tales will contain all that is valuable in the originals, perhaps it's wise to remember that they were told and retold by the hearth in centuries past because they offered something for everyone gathered there, of varied ages and experience. Bruno Bettelheim called the tales a "magic mirror," capable of reflecting a range of deep fears and desires: for gingerbread and poison, kisses and cruelty, death and "happily ever after." Each reader discovers a different story, and each new interpreter borrows what inspires him and leaves the rest for the next to fall under their spell. SARAH HARRISON SMITH, a former editor at The Times, teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 13, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Acclaimed author, artist, and illustrator Shaun Tan is no stranger to things wondrous and strange, so it seems only natural that his latest book taps the world of Grimms' Fairy Tales for inspiration. Seventy-five are included here, ranging from well-known favorites to the downright obscure. Rather than straightforward retellings, Tan has carefully selected one pivotal moment that captures the essence of each story: a young woman agrees to marry a bear-man in repayment for his kindness; a blacksmith captures the devil in a sack; a queen holds the key to a room containing coffins for her 12 sons; and so on. Accompanying each tale is a full-page color photograph of an original mixed-media sculpture. Miniature in size, these, too, are whittled to their most essential elements most figures are little more than mere suggestion, but others are exaggerated to the point of grotesque. The creep factor of the sculptures, shrouded in shadows and dimly lit, is heightened considerably through a masterful balance of the foreign and familiar, of nefarious action and trademark whimsy. A brief history of the Brothers Grimm by scholar Jack Zipes and an annotated index provide a broader context for the collection. A foreword by Neil Gaiman only heightens appeal. A stunning, eerie addition to fairy tale and folklore collections. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Tan is renowned for his odd, striking illustrations. Expect his fans to line up for this collection of his sculptural work.--Hayes, Summer Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Tan (Rules of Summer) fashions 75 haunting sculptures, each meant to capture the spirit of one of Grimms' fairy tales. A short excerpt from the tale that inspired the artwork appears on the left of each spread, accompanied by a photograph of its sculpture on the right. Tan acknowledges Inuit and pre-Colombian influences in an afterword, but each figure carries its own creaturely spark. For Rumpelstiltskin ("The door suddenly opened, and a little man entered"), Tan creates a scarlet imp with dancing limbs and a toothy grin. For the Brementown musicians, the heads of the four animals are stacked as on a totem pole, mouths agape as they sing and shriek. In a foreword, Neil Gaiman writes, "I want to hold these sculptures, to pick them up. I want to squeeze them in my hands," capturing the book's mix of charm and frustration. Although readers can only see Tan's remarkable artistry in two dimensions, the figures exert an almost primal force. Rather than simply represent what happens in these stories, these pieces embody their power. Ages 12-up. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 5 Up-Tan's latest holds a complete art exhibit within its pages of photographs and excerpts from Grimms' folktales and fairy tales. Tan has thoughtfully paired 75 of his original sculptures with paragraphs from the Brothers' familiar and obscure selections. Inspired by Inuit stone carvings and pre-Columbian clay figures, Tan's sculptures exude a fresh, naive style. When combined with the texts, the seemingly simple sculptural forms become as complex as the tales they represent. With a foreword by Neil Gaiman and commentary by folklore scholar Jack Zipes, this volume is a first of its kind contribution to the genre. Since each piece provides only a snippet of the accompanying story, the book follows up with summaries of the fairy tales and suggestions for further reading. Younger audiences may be frustrated by the vague texts chosen to illustrate the sculptures. In fact, the book's entire concept may be too esoteric for anyone preferring elaborate decoration and happily-ever-after endings. However, the images, rendered from air-dry clay, papier-mâché, paint, and found objects from nature, are, by turns, fanciful, gruesome, and thought provoking. The book is expertly minimalist, providing potential opportunities for discussion of story elements, art appreciation, and philosophy for a wide age range. VERDICT A unique addition to special and robust folktale and fairy-tale and/or art collections.-Jane Miller, Nashville Public Library © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
In the hands of creative teachers, librarians, and parents, this book-lovers book will find its way to a broad age range of kids through riveting art and tantalizing story-bites. Each of seventy-five double-page spreads comprises, on the verso, a quote from one of the Grimms tales as translated by Zipes (who also writes an accessible introduction to this work). On the recto facing the text is a full-page photograph by Tan of a sculpture he has created to power-drive the story. Neil Gaimans foreword provides eloquent commentary on the minimalist art, which is akin to folktale structure in its spare composition. Opposite the famous dialogue in Little Red Cap, for instance (Oh, Grandmother, what big ears you have!), rises a legless figure whose sharp nose, slitted eyes, and long ears all turn suggestively toward the small rounded figure standing on its back. Shes the same height as the creatures vertically lifted, knife-like tail, and all that defines her is a scarlet parka hood and a pair of helplessly folded hands. Show this to viewers, read the quote aloud, and then have them create their own image; or suggest some Grimms tales to read for selecting and illustrating quotes, a stimulating way to focus on both verbal and visual language. The artists personal afterword and note on his medium and process, inspired by and stylistically reflective of Inuit stone carvings and pre-Columbian clay figurines, along with some suggestions for further reading, complete this thoughtful compendium. betsy hearne (c) Copyright 2016. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
