Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses (review)

In sharp, ironic, and often darkly funny free verse, Koertge reimagines twenty-three well-known fairy tales, from "Bluebeard" to "Thumbelina" to "Goldilocks and the Three Bears", in free-verse poetry whose verse paragraphs hover between fragmented prose and poetry. Like others who have pursued this project before him, he draws out the repressed, unvoiced sides of the stories. The boy who exposed the nakedness of the emperor tires of being right when everyone around him objects, and he concedes the point by adopting his own set of invisible clothes; Hansel and Gretel's appetite for revenge isn't fully sated on the witch, so they turn their attention to their weak-willed father; the tale of Little Thumb has entirely the wrong moral. Koertge keeps his ironic lens focused on preadolescent concerns, such as the lust for excitement regardless of danger, the fecklessness of parents, the casual cruelty of revenge, the malaise of happily ever after. The accompanying illustrations—digital silhouettes of skeletons, princesses, ogres, dismembered limbs, children in cages, and woodcutters, some dripping with gore—are a shade more grisly than the poems themselves, extending their meaning through evocative tableaus of key scenes and providing inspiration for art and storytelling projects. The poems would also make good scripts for readers' theater or savory choices for reading aloud, and the book would make a splendid companion to Strauss' Trail of Stones (BCCB 4/90).