Gretel and the Dark
As hinted by the title, Gretel and the Dark is a novel built on fairy tales. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, an eminent psychoanalyst takes in a young girl, found beaten and naked at the edge of the city. Though he calls her Lilie, she doesn’t tell him her real name, instead insisting she’s an automaton, created and sent to destroy a monster she cannot name. Years later in Germany, a girl named Krysta plays alone in a grand house. She’s spoiled, stubborn, and intensely curious about the strange infirmary where her father has taken a job. The visitors to their house laugh and tell her the infirmary is full of animals, but her father, taken to compulsive hand-washing, refuses to talk about his work there. With a new life full of secrets that even Krysta does not fully understand, she retreats into the familiar world of the oft-gruesome fairy tales her old nurse used to tell her.
This is a novel as dark and twisting as the Black Forest. Both Krysta and Lilie weave their stories in between fairy tales—not the stuff of princesses and white steeds, but the unflinchingly terrifying Grimms’ tales. Yet they don’t give those stories up easily. Lilie is mysterious; the reader wonders along with the Viennese doctor who she is and where she’s come from. Krysta narrates her story with a naivety that becomes almost painful as the reader sees and understands what she does not. Until the end, her who, what, and where are as mysterious as Lilie’s.
Forbidding, secretive, richly historical, this is a gripping novel that will leave you guessing until the end.
