Hansel and Gretel by Neil Gaiman (review)

In this measured, forthright retelling of the familiar tale, Gaiman draws on the features originally told to the Grimm brothers by Dortchen Wild, who later became Wilhelm Grimm’s wife. That means that there is neither stepmother nor witch; instead, Hansel overhears his mother presenting her logical argument to abandon the children in the forest so that she and her husband might have some hope of surviving the famine caused by the war. He reluctantly agrees, but he is happy when the children outsmart the plan. However, as conditions worsen, their mother persuades their father to abandon them a second time, this time without sufficient warning to collect the stones that will lead them home. Happening upon the gingerbread house, they are fooled by the benign appearance of the old woman who lives there, and she drugs and enslaves them, fattening Hansel in a cage and chaining Gretel to a table leg while forcing her to cook and clean for her. The two escape in the usual way, returning home to find their mother dead and their father quite happy to see them (and the riches they have brought from the old woman’s home). Gaiman’s text eschews any sort of theatrical embellishments in the telling, leaving the grim story to play out its own horrors in a smoothly understated way, but his quiet, sure-footed prose makes for a haunting tale nonetheless. Every other opening is a full-bleed brush ink illustration that hints at the action while more fully evoking the gloomy atmospherics of the tale. The trim size suggests more graphic novel than picture book, which amps up the appeal for older readers and makes for an elegant addition to the 398.2 section. An editorial note follows the text, tracing the likely roots and historical progression of the story from the Great Famine of 1315 to Wild’s 1812 version to the drawings Mattotti created in 2007, which provided Gaiman’s inspiration for this retelling.