After a brief hiatus (moving into our new apartment was all-consuming!), it’s time for another #spellbooksaturday! This one comes with a serious CONTENT WARNING (sexual assaults, child abuse, animal abuse, murder & violence), though given that it’s based on classic fairy tales, we shouldn’t really be surprised— I mean, have you ever read some of the original Grimms’ fairy tales? They’re pretty horrifying, and as a retelling of Hansel and Gretel, today’s book is very much in keeping with that tradition. I’d like to give it 2.5 stars, but rounding up, we have…
After the Forest by Kell Woods
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Ginger. Honey. Cinnamon. Flour.
(source: goodreads)
Twenty years after the witch in the gingerbread house, Greta and Hans are struggling to get by. Their mother and stepmother are long dead, Hans is deeply in debt from gambling, and the countryside lies in ruin, its people starving in the aftermath of a brutal war.
Greta has a secret, the witch’s grimoire, secreted away and whispering in Greta’s ear for the past two decades, and the recipe inside that makes the best gingerbread you’ve ever tasted. As long as she can bake, Greta can keep her small family afloat.
But in a village full of superstition, Greta and her mysteriously addictive gingerbread, not to mention the rumors about her childhood misadventures, is a source of gossip and suspicion.
And now, dark magic is returning to the woods and Greta’s magic—magic she is still trying to understand—may be the only thing that can save her. If it doesn’t kill her first.
I was really intrigued by the premise of After the Forest— what happens to the characters in fairy tales after the “happy” ending? Given the infamous events of their youth, Greta (Gretel) and Hans (Hansel) are now deeply damaged adults, grappling with PTSD and unresolved trauma. I felt there was a lot of unrealized potential in this story, opportunities to cultivate real emotional depth, but Woods’s storytelling never quite lived up to my own imagination. Greta’s naïveté and perpetual state of incredulity wore on me (like really, you’re stunned magical things are happening?!), and there were several plot lines and characters that felt entirely superfluous to me (some tertiary characters were hard to keep track of, and even harder to care about), but overall, this was a mildly entertaining debut novel. (One major point of contention: Should you choose to listen to the audiobook, I found Esther Wane’s different voices for different characters to be really over the top, it felt ridiculous to the point of pantomime.)
Have you read After the Forest? What were your thoughts? Share in the comments!
DID YOU ENJOY THIS SPELLBOOK SATURDAY FEATURE? FOLLOW ME ON GOODREADS, AND CHECK OUT SOME MORE READING RECOMMENDATIONS…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
