Book Review: The True Story of Hansel and Gretel

Title: The True Story of Hansel and Gretel
Author: Louise Murphy
Category: Fairytales/Retellings; Holocaust; Historical Fiction
Length: 320 pages
My Rating:  8 – Excellent

From Goodreads: In the last months of the Nazi occupation of Poland, two children are left by their father and stepmother to find safety in a dense forest. Because their real names will reveal their Jewishness, they are renamed "Hansel" and "Gretel." They wander in the woods until they are taken in by Magda, an eccentric and stubborn old woman called "witch" by the nearby villagers. Magda is determined to save them, even as a German officer arrives in the village with his own plans for the children.

Combining classic themes of fairy tales and war literature, Louise Murphy’s haunting novel of journey and survival, of redemption and memory, powerfully depicts how war is experienced by families and especially by children. The True Story of Hansel and Gretal tells a resonant, riveting story.

My Thoughts

I'm starting my journal late but want to include all of my 2013 reading and onwards, so I am going back to the books I read at the beginning of the year. As it is the middle of February now, it will be difficult for me to recall all that I felt while reading this book in the beginning of January, but I'm going to give it a go.

I gave this book an eight rating ("Excellent"), which means that I really enjoyed reading it but I'm not intent on re-reading it again in the future. I am a huge fan of non-fiction Holocaust literature, but The True Story of Hansel and Gretel is one of the best fictional Holocaust books (along with Mila 18 by Leon Uris) I have ever read. Louise Murphy held nothing back, something many fictional Holocaust writers tend to do, and I admire and appreciate her for writing candidly about the hard stuff.

I read this book with The Cackling Hens—my in real life book club. The book gave us plenty to discuss and all members enjoyed reading it.

I really enjoyed Murphy's re-telling of Hansel and Gretel and thought she did an effective job overall. I do feel she was stretching a couple of times while trying to fit in all of the elements of the fairy tale, but nothing that turned me off of the book.

I was really hoping the children's real names would be revealed at the end of this book and, at the time of finishing, remember being disappointed that they weren't. Now, though, I'm okay with it and think it sweetens the new beginning the children and their father were starting together. It almost makes them real and that this was an intimate moment where they could begin their lives again privately.