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Dec. 22nd, 2012 11:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsToday I'm going to talk about Anne Ursu's Breadcrumbs, which is sort of a retelling of The Snow Queen, which means that if you are, for example, a person who is currently writing a retelling of The Snow Queen, do not read this post! MOVE ON. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.
Anyway: Breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs is about a girl named Hazel, who doesn't fit. She doesn't look like her parents; they got her from India when she was a baby. She doesn't have much of a family anymore; her dad got up one day and left. She doesn't fit in her new school; in her old school she used to get praised for her imagination, but here she's just weird, just different.
She's still got her best friend Jack, though. And when they share story ideas or play superhero baseball together (this involves superheroes who playing baseball while trying not to give away that they are superheroes - Batman has a terrible average, for whatever reason) things are pretty much okay.
But one day Jack stops talking to her, and then he disappears, and it's up to Hazel to go into the woods to get him back -- the woods that are full of witches and swans and dancing red shoes, the woods where you can find all the things that are cruel and nonsensical and true about fairy tales.
The real world is cold, unpredictable, and devastatingly lonely.
The woods are worse.
This is one of the best books I've read this year. It's also a book I feel like I need to stick a trigger warning on - not for any of the usual kinds of things, really, but for devastating emotional honesty about loneliness, and loss, and the fact that living in the world is sometimes the hardest thing to do. But recommended, very much.
Anyway: Breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs is about a girl named Hazel, who doesn't fit. She doesn't look like her parents; they got her from India when she was a baby. She doesn't have much of a family anymore; her dad got up one day and left. She doesn't fit in her new school; in her old school she used to get praised for her imagination, but here she's just weird, just different.
She's still got her best friend Jack, though. And when they share story ideas or play superhero baseball together (this involves superheroes who playing baseball while trying not to give away that they are superheroes - Batman has a terrible average, for whatever reason) things are pretty much okay.
But one day Jack stops talking to her, and then he disappears, and it's up to Hazel to go into the woods to get him back -- the woods that are full of witches and swans and dancing red shoes, the woods where you can find all the things that are cruel and nonsensical and true about fairy tales.
The real world is cold, unpredictable, and devastatingly lonely.
The woods are worse.
This is one of the best books I've read this year. It's also a book I feel like I need to stick a trigger warning on - not for any of the usual kinds of things, really, but for devastating emotional honesty about loneliness, and loss, and the fact that living in the world is sometimes the hardest thing to do. But recommended, very much.
