Grimms' Fairy Tales

It's a cast nearly everyone half-remembers. Briar Rose, sleeping a hundred years behind a hedge of thorns that swallows a whole palace. Hansel marking his way with pebbles, and Gretel, who saves them both by inviting a witch to demonstrate her own oven. Rapunzel letting down her golden hair. Ilsabill, the fisherman's wife, wishing herself all the way from a cottage to the sun and moon. And Rumpelstiltskin, spinning through the night and singing to himself, "Little does my lady dream Rumpelstiltskin is my name."

The prose is plainspoken and unhurried, built for reading aloud, with songs that repeat word for word and phrases a listener learns to chant along. Real darkness runs through it, a wolf dressed in a grandmother's cap and lying in her bed, and beside it a deadpan comic streak: four aging animals stacking themselves into a tottering tower to frighten a band of robbers, a dwarf so enraged he stamps his foot clean through the floor.

Underneath the enchantment runs a quiet logic. Small mercies to overlooked creatures come back around; foolishness turns out to be wisdom in disguise; the strong are humbled and the humble raised. The door stands open on a wood that has been waiting a very long time to be walked into again.