Maguire’s characteristic tone is dark and enchanting in his newest fairy tale revision... a powerful story of hope and redemption sure to delight his fans.” — Booklist (starred review)

“Enchanting, mystical and filled with wonder, it’s the perfect holiday fairy tale for grown-ups.” — People

“An inventive, and often dark, retelling of the holiday classic.” — BuzzFeed News

“Continuing his tradition of rewriting fairy tales with an arch eye and offbeat point of view, Maguire turns his attention to Lewis Carroll and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland…A brilliant and nicely off-kilter reading of the children’s classic, retrofitted for grown-ups—and a lot of fun.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Maguire’s characteristic tone is dark and enchanting in his newest fairy tale revision... a powerful story of hope and redemption sure to delight his fans.

Enchanting, mystical and filled with wonder, it’s the perfect holiday fairy tale for grown-ups.

An inventive, and often dark, retelling of the holiday classic.

Enchanting, mystical and filled with wonder, it’s the perfect holiday fairy tale for grown-ups.

10/15/2017
The author of Wicked and After Alice has written an origin fairy tale for toymaker Drosselmeier and the famous Nutcracker he creates, the protagonists of an E.T.A. Hoffman story that was later transformed into Tchaikovsky's famous ballet. The novel begins with Drosselmeier's beginnings as a young foundling, living in the forest with an old couple. A fateful trip to fell a tree sets the boy on a winding path with a magical knife. He finds shelter and work along the way and eventually begins a long friendship and possibly something more with Felix Stahlbaum, grandfather of Fritz and Marie-Claire, commonly known as Klara, and the recipient of the magical Nutcracker. VERDICT Maguire combines the Greek myth of Pan and Pythia with the dark undertones of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, resulting in a strangely fascinating reimagining of how the Nutcracker came to be. Lovers of classical retellings and the author's other books will admire. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/17.]

With a storyteller’s ease and a bit of a wink and a nod, narrator Steven Crossley leads the listener on a dark, wild, and altogether strange adventure. A cast-off woodcutter’s son who sets out to seek his fortune as a toy maker meets a menagerie of fairy-tale creatures, musicians, and milkmaids along the way. The tale combines the darker strains of the Brothers Grimm with a hardscrabble view of early-nineteenth-century German peasant life, and without Crossley’s light vocal touch, it might have collapsed under its own weight. Instead, Crossley accentuates the hopeful and redemptive tones that arise when a child finds a hand-carved nutcracker under the Christmas tree. This folktale is decidedly not for children, but for more for thoughtful adults. B.P. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

★ 2017-08-14
A delightful, mystical, mythical confection by zeitgeist whisperer Maguire (After Alice, 2015, etc.), who likes nothing more than to work at the dark edges of a fairy tale. As evidenced especially in Wicked and its sequels, Maguire has a sharp appreciation for what struck Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm way back when: especially if they're German, the stories we tell our children are marvels of mayhem, compressed slices of violence and bleakness gussied up with an occasional shiny poisoned apple. In them, death is always present. So it is with this latest foray, in which Maguire locates a perhaps unwilling hero in a young foundling, Dirk Drosselmeier, who, having courted death himself, proves to be inept enough with an ax at his adopted woodcutter father's house to be packed off into the world—narrowly avoiding death, it seems, at the hands of the old man and his wicked-witchish wife. "He's witnessed enough to be scared already, I can't make it worse," she cackles, and off he goes. But the world has plenty of terrors of its own to offer, including the fact that everyone he loves will die or otherwise leave him. He learns to live on his own wits and resources; "I'm more like a spider," he says, "I cling with strings and hooks only to every passing day." Improbably, in the face of all that sorrow and odd encounters with the likes of the quack Doctor Mesmer, he makes good; he wasn't so handy with a hatchet, but with smaller blades he carves out a formidable nutcracker that evolves, in his hands, "from it to he." Shades of Pinocchio! It's at this juncture that, as if a mist lifting, the darkness of the story brightens and, magically, the familiar story that we know from Tchaikovsky's Christmas classic, Klara and the King of Mice and all, resolves with brilliant clarity. It's a fine bit of sorcery on Maguire's part, but of course, as all things must, it ends darkly. A splendid revisitation of folklore that takes us to and from familiar cultural touchstones into realms to make Freud blanch. Wonderful.