Tag Archives: fairy tales

By The Book

by Anna

By Jasmine Guillory

I had known that this was a modern day retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but hadn’t realized that it was explicitly Disney, like from a Disney imprint. I’m not a Disney adult (I wasn’t even that much of a Disney kid), so even the relatively subtle allusions to Mrs. Potts and Lumière made me roll my eyes. Despite myself, though, I found myself charmed—Guillory’s skill with characters kept me wanting to know what happened next.

Protagonist Isabelle (goes by Izzy, not Belle) is working in her first career job as an editorial assistant at Tale as Old as Time publishing house (sigh), and facing the disillusionment with her dreams that I assume most of us do in our mid-20s. In a somewhat desperate (and tipsy) attempt to gain favor with her harsh boss and to rekindle her passion for publishing, she offers to coax a much belated manuscript out of child-actor-turned-messy-adult, Beau.

Beau, of course, lives in a beautiful, huge house with extended gardens (and essential large library) in semi-isolation as he struggles with severe writer’s block. He is rude and somewhat mocking to Izzy at first, but nothing egregious. It’s a tricky thing to write a “beast” who is sufficiently off-putting but not abusive, and I don’t have any solutions to that, but Beau felt mild enough that I struggled to fully empathize with Izzy’s antagonism. He seemed like kind of a dick, Izzy on her last thread of patience, and I would have shrugged them both off.

However, once they found a level of friendship working on Beau’s manuscript, I was much more interested in the process by which Izzy talks Beau into overcoming his fear of the blank page, something I assume Guillory has her own vast experience with. Of course, the end got more romantic (though stayed pretty solidly PG with all sex happening off page) and less about the publishing world, so I was less into it, but it did all wrap up very satisfyingly, maybe even a little too pat, though that is to be expected with fairy tales, right?

Every Heart a Doorway

by Kinsey

I first started following Seanan McGuire on Twitter when someone linked to her hilarious series of tweets about an owl in her yard. It wasn’t until I had already seen about 100 pictures of her cats that I realized that she was an author that we’ve actually reviewed here on the site. Back in 2012 Anna thought that Rosemary and Rue was hit or miss, but I quite liked her latest, Every Heart a Doorway.

I think I was won over just by the concept: it’s a murder mystery set at a boarding school for teenagers who found doors into magical fairy realms as kids, but are now stuck back in the real world. I mean, that’s great, right?

I actually agree with what Anna said in her earlier review of McGuire’s writing:  occasionally things felt a bit forced, almost like I could see the author saying, “And now I will do this.” But this is really a small complaint. The premise is great, there were fabulous details about the various fairy realms one might wander into, and the whole story had a sense of creepiness that was delightful. The reader sees the action through the eyes of the main character, who had spent her time away in a world of the dead, and her desire for quiet and stillness infuses the book in a wonderful way.

This is just a quick little story, really like a novella, so there’s not a whole lot more to say. Except that this is well worth your time. Also, isn’t Every Heart a Doorway just the best book title? It’s like a line of poetry I want to recite over and over.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Fairy tale aftermath.

You might also like: The Scream movies, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or possibly Wicked? That seems like an odd selection of media, but my favorite thing about Every Heart a Doorway was how it used the tropes of fairy tales and made them part of the story, which all of those other things do (in their genres) as well. Although in tone and length, this felt an awful lot like The Ocean at the End of the Lane.