Book Review: The Ickabog by J.K. Rowling

The Ickabog

by J.K. Rowling (j Rowling)

 

From the creator of Harry Potter comes a wonderful fairytale called The Ickabog, a story that served as a bedtime story for author J.K. Rowling’s own children when they were small. During the year of COVID when most of us were staying safe at home, Rowling dusted off her notes about the story and released it online in serial form, a gift to all those children who were unable to venture out and discover new books. The story is about two small children who are neighbors and best friends in the land of Cornucopia. The country is ruled by King Fred the Fearless who goes north in his kingdom to seek out the Ickabog, a monster that no one has seen — until now.

 

The story spans several years as the prosperous country is taken over by evil Lords and driven to poverty and despair. The prevailing themes of friendship and hope make this one of the best fairytales I have read. Rowling’s ability to create memorable characters and witty dialogue make her one of the best writers of her generation. I literally could not put the book down and finished it in one day. The Ickabog is not a light fairytale as it deals with death and child abuse, so caution should be taken in reading this to small children. When the book was published in November 2020, the author included artwork created by children from many countries who participated in an online contest to illustrate the story. I highly recommend this book!

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart or Uprooted and Spinning Silver, both by Naomi Novik.]

[ official The Ickabog page on the official J.K. Rowling web site ]

 

Recommended by Kim J.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Services

 

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Book Review: Through the Woods by Emily Carroll

Through the Woods
by Emily Carroll (741.5 Car)

I have been a fan of Emily Carroll’s artwork for a long time, and if you’ve been on the internet in the past ten years there’s a good chance you have also had the opportunity to view her strange and haunting illustrations. In Through the Woods, Carroll takes the beautiful fairy tales and dark nighttime stories of folklore long past and twists them masterfully into pages ripe with the nightmares you’ve long forgotten the specifics of by the time you wake up, yet still leave you with unease and longing. If you’re a fan of Poe, of Brontë, or of any story macabre and spooky, you will treasure Through the Woods.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Death and Dementia, by Edgar Allen Poe, Alice Isn’t Dead, by Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale, also by Joseph Fink, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, or Thornhill, by Pam Smy.]

[ publisher’s Through the Woods web page ] | [ official Emily Carroll web site ]

Recommended by Elanor J.
Gere Branch Library

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Review: Once Upon a Time: The Complete First Season (on DVD)

Once Upon a Time: The Complete First Season
[DVD Once] 

Once Upon a Time puts a twist on your average fairy tale by mixing them all together. Meet Emma Swan. On her 28th birthday she makes a wish not to be alone. Suddenly, a child named Henry knocks on her door and claims to be the son she gave up for adoption years ago. He tells her he is from Storybrooke, Maine and the people who live in Storybrooke are different…they’re fairy tale characters stuck in a world with no happy endings. And the worst part is they don’t even know it. When she drives him back she meets his mother Regina (who he claims is the evil queen) who happens to be the Mayor of the town. She starts to bond with Henry and decides to stick around. As the season continues Henry continues to try to convince her that magic is real, Regina does all she can to scare her away, and little by little Emma starts to believe.

I’m a huge fairy tale fan and this show is so unique because while you can connect each character to their own original background story the beauty is really the twists it takes to mix them all together.
[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Enchanted, Grimm, Sleepy Hollow or Charmed (all on DVD).]

 

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this TV series ] | [ ABC’s official Once Upon a Time web site ]

Recommended by Carrie R.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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Review: Enchanted (on DVD)

Enchanted
written by Bill Kelly, directed by Kevin Lima [DVD j Enchanted] 

This 2007 film is an absolutely charming cross between a traditional Disney-style animated fairy tale movie and a contemporary Harlequin-style Hallmark romance movie. Amy Adams (in one of her earlier roles before she became a perennial Oscar contender) stars as Giselle, a beautiful young maiden in the animated kingdom of Andalasia, who is banished by that kingdom’s Evil Queen to the live-action gritty, grungy streets of Manhattan. Completely innocent to the harsher realities of our world, Giselle, in her glittery ballgown, is rescued by a bitter divorce lawyer (played by Patrick Dempsey) and stays with him and his young daughter. Meanwhile, the animated Prince that Giselle was engaged to wed comes through to our world to try to rescue his betrothed, and the Evil Queen’s minion also tries to keep an eye on Giselle in the live-action world.

Written by Bill Kelly, directed by Kevin Lima, and with music by the incomparable Alan Menken, this is NOT your typical Disney princess film. But by the end, it still gives you all the positive “feels” that any fairy tale princess story does. Great performances, especially by Adams and Dempsey, and James Marsen as Prince Edward, this film also features Julie Andrews as its “narrator”. This one is a lot of fun and has some really catchy music, including “Ever Ever After” performed by Carrie Underwood.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Enchanted, or Enchanted: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.]

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this film ] | [ official Enchanted web site ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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Fables 2: Animal Farm by Bill Willingham

Fables 2: Animal Farm
by Bill Willingham [YA PB (Graphic Novel) Willingham] 

The Fables are back in another story, which is long enough this time to take up this whole volume without the addition of shorter stories. It picks up just after volume one, so I recommend that you start at the beginning. To reveal any of the plot here is a spoiler for the first volume; Rose Red was not really dead in the ‘Legends in Exile’ story. Rose Red and her sister Snow White take a trip up to the farm where the Fables who don’t look like people, such as the Three Little Pigs, the giants, and Shere Khan, live away from society so as not to be revealed to the wider world that the characters from fables are real and living in the same world. The visit does not go as planned due to an up rise among the farm residents who feel that all Fables are created equal, but some more equal than others. The revolt and it’s consequences take up most of the story, and the ending is not entirely a happy one. I’ll let you read it for yourself since I enjoyed all the surprises so much I don’t want to spoil them for you. This has been a very enjoyable series so far and personally I’m looking forward to reading the whole thing over time. If you want to see what happened after the story was over for the fable characters you read as a kid, this is a really fun graphic novel series. What’s also nice is the amount of character development there is from volume to volume. If you prefer e-books then you can also check this out online with Hoopla Digital either in a browser or the app.

One last note is that these stories were published in the volumes reviewed here on BookGuide and as deluxe editions, which are hardback and longer, so there are only 14 of them. The stories line up fairly evenly but sometimes the shorter ones get shuffled around a bit differently in the different volume lines. Originally they came out as comic books, not graphic novels, so you could go that route too if you wanted.

[If you enjoy this, almost all the rest of the series is on Hoopla. At the moment they have up to volume 21 out of the 22!]

 official Fables web page on the Vertigo comics site ] | [ official Bill Willingham web site ]

 

Recommended by Kristen A.
Gere Branch Library

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Fables 1: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham

Fables 1: Legends in Exile
by Bill Willingham [YA PB (Graphic Novel) Willingham] 

Ever wonder what happened to the Big Bad Wolf, Snow White, Goldilocks, Little Boy Blue and the other characters from classic fables? Well, it turns out that they were driven out of their Fable worlds into ours centuries ago by who or what is only referred to as the adversary. They don’t age and it’s difficult for them to die so long as humans continue telling their tales. They have set up a Fabletown in the midst of a large city and this graphic novel series tell of their present and bit of their past. There are a couple of stories in this book. Legends in Exile is the longest and it’s basically a murder mystery. The sister of Snow White, Rose Red, goes missing, her apartment is ransacked and there’s blood everywhere. Bigby, the Big Bad Wolf in human form (as an enchantment), plays detective. It was set up like a classic mystery story even with the get together at the end where the murderer is revealed in front of everyone involved. The next story is much shorter and is actually a prose story about Bigby, called A Wolf in the Fold. It tells of the wolf back in the homelands when people were fleeing for the human world, and a few centuries later after he passed into our world and was brought out of the wilderness into Fabeltown and gained his enchantment to look like a human. The last story is, The Price of a Happy Ending. It’s also set in the homelands during the struggle against the adversary and involved Little Bo Peep. Over all this is a really well written series. There is a lot of character development and a lot of secrets of the past to be revealed at the series continues. I highly recommend it as it’s full of adventure, surprise, mystery and a cast of familiar but new characters. I also like that the white space between the comic frames will change color or pattern depending on what’s happening in the story – I thought this was a nice touch that added a lot to the reading experience. If you prefer e-books then you can also check this out online with Hoopla Digital either in a browser or the app.

[If you enjoy this, almost all the rest of the series is on Hoopla. At the moment they have up to volume 21 out of the 22. One last note is that these stories were published in the volumes reviewed here and as deluxe volumes, which are hardback and longer, so there are only 14 of them. The stories line up fairly evenly but sometimes the shorter ones get shuffled around a bit differently in the different volume lines. Originally they came out as comic books, not graphic novels, so you could go that route too if you wanted.]

[ official Fables web page on the Vertigo comics site ] | [ official Bill Willingham web site ]

Recommended by Kristen A.
Gere Branch Library

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Snow White: A Graphic Novel by Matt Phelan

Snow White: A Graphic Novel
by Matt Phelan [j Phelan] 

The stark simplicity of this book’s cover caught my eye on the library’s new books display, with a typeface that screamed “1930s”. This book is a re-imagining of the classic Snow White fairy tale, told in a setting of 1930s Depression era New York City. The “evil Queen” is Snow’s stepmother, a vain performer who has become the “Queen of Broadway”, the “magic mirror” is a stock-market ticker-tape machine that spits out messages. And the Seven Dwarfs are seven street ruffians who rescue snow from muggers and take an immediate liking to her. // The artwork is fairly stark — black and white with only a few splashes of significant color added for effect. In some scenes, the artist manages an almost dream-like quality. I’ll have to admit, not ALL of the art appealed to me, so I’ll drop my rating of this from what would have been a 9 to an 8. Otherwise, a very imaginative read. I recommend this for anyone who is a fan of this classic storyline…you may enjoy this twist!

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try the TV series Once Upon a Time, which similarly takes well-known fairy tales and spins them in new directions]

[ official Matt Phelan web site ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewers recommendations!

The Heartless Troll by Oyvind Torseter

The Heartless Troll
by Oyvind Torseter [j Torseter] 

This came highly recommended to me by a couple of other readers, both a co-worker and one of our library customer “regulars”, so when a copy came across the desk, recently, I decided to take a chance on it. In the end, I don’t think I’m necessarily the “target audience” for this one. Norwegian artist, illustrator, author and comic-book creator Oyvind Torseter takes a classic Norwegian folk tale, about “the troll without a heart”, and turns it into a fancifully-illustrated childrens’ adventure tale.

When all but one of the sons of a ruler leave home in search of brides, but disappear, the seventh and youngest prince tells his father that he must seek out his missing brethren and find out their fates. Provided with a reluctant and sarcastic horse, and minimal supplies, the young prince sets out on an epic quest, overcoming a number of obstacles before reaching the terrifying lair of a Troll, who has turned all the other princes and their wives into stone statues.

Aided by a number of talking animals, a very cooperative captive princess, and his own common sense, the prince must figure out a way to capture the massive troll’s heart, in order to set his family free. This is a fairly simple story overall, and Torseter’s artwork is both detailed and yet whimsical. There is a sense of humor to the whole story — particularly in the dialog provided by the hero’s unheroic horse. Kids will probably appreciate this more than adults. I was hoping to find it unforgettable, but I basically just got some chuckles out of it in the end.

[ official Oyvind Torseter blog ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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Ever After: A Cinderella Story

Ever After: A Cinderella Story

The title of this 1998 film says it all: it's the story of Cinderella. Drew Barrymore plays Danielle (Cinderella) and her Cinderella has a great deal of moxie. Dougray Scott is a very handsome prince. But the character to watch is Anjelica Huston as the wicked step-mother, the Baroness de Ghent. She ignores Cinderella and treats her as a servant not so much because she is wicked, but because she is a social climber, hoping to advance the fortunes of her own daughter (but only one -- her other daughter is a tad on the plump side and at the ball, Anjelica impolitely tells her that she's only there to eat. Later, when the prince and Danielle are married and the Baroness is getting her comeupance, she needs someone to speak up for her, but this daughter remarks, "I'm only here to eat." A lovely moment.) Still, for all of her cruelty and selfishness, she exhibits an undercurrent of humanity as is oddly appealing. In addition, the production values are breathtaking. The sets and costumes for THE ball are romantic and sumptuous. -- recommended by Rianne S. - Bennett Martin Public Library

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this film ] | [ official Ever After web site ]

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New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide web site. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month.