Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses

by Ron Koertge, Andrea Dezso (Illustrator)

Overview

Writing in free verse honed to a wicked edge, the incomparable Ron Koertge brings dark and contemporary humor to twenty iconic fairy tales.

Once upon a time, there was a strung-out match girl who sold CDs to stoners. Twelve impetuous sisters escaped King Daddy’s clutches to jiggle and cavort and wear out their shoes. A fickle Thumbelina searched for a tiny husband, leaving bodies in her wake. And Little Red Riding Hood confessed that she kind of wanted to know what it’s like to be swallowed whole. From bloodied and blinded stepsisters (they were duped) to a chopped-off finger flying into a heroine’s cleavage, this is fairy tale world turned upside down. Ron Koertge knows what really happened to all those wolves and maidens, ogres and orphans, kings and piglets, and he knows about the Ever After. So come closer — he wants to whisper in your ear.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780763644062
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	07/10/2012
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Ron Koertge is the author of many award-winning novels, including Stoner & Spaz and its sequel, Now Playing: Stoner & Spaz II; Shakespeare Bats Cleanup; Strays; Deadville; Margaux with an X; The Brimstone Journals; and The Arizona Kid. A two-time winner of the PEN Literary Award for Children’s Literature, he lives in South Pasadena, California.

Andrea Dezsö is a visual artist and writer who works across a broad range of media. She is a full-time faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art and lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

The language here is modern, brutal and sharp as a carving knife. The cut-paper silhouette illustrations, rendered by Andrea Dezso in black and red, are haunting and perfect…Koertge is a master at getting to subtle and uncomfortable emotional truths and relaying them in just a few precise lines.
—Holly Black

The New York Times Book Review

With sardonic wit and a decidedly contemporary sensibility, Koertge (Shakespeare Bats Cleanup) retells 23 classic fairy tales in free verse, written from the perspectives of iconic characters like Little Red Riding Hood, as well as maligned or minor figures such as the Mole from Thumbelina and Cinderella’s stepsisters. For the princess from the Princess and the Pea, hypersensitivity isn’t all that great (“A puppy licked me and I’ve still got a scar”), and the Little Match Girl appears in a poem with the rhythm of a rap song (“She’s selling CDs on the corner,/ fifty cents to any stoner,/ any homeboy with a boner”). Several stories trade happily ever after for disappointment and discontent, as with the danger-addicted queen in Rumpelstiltskin, or with Rapunzel, who is left with a moody prince instead of the attentive witch who locked her in. Dezsö’s cut-paper Scherenschnitte-style silhouettes nod toward Hans Christian Andersen’s own papercuts—if Andersen were creating a storyboard for the Saw franchise. From Bluebeard’s beheaded wives to a bloody dismemberment in “The Robber Bridegroom,” there are gruesome surprises throughout. A fiendishly clever and darkly funny collection. Ages 14–up. (July)

Publishers Weekly

The language here is modern, brutal and sharp as a carving knife. The cut-paper silhouette illustrations, rendered by Andrea Dezso in black and red, are haunting and perfect.
—The New York Times

With sardonic wit and a decidedly contemporary sensibility, Koertge retells 23 classic fairy tales in free verse, written from the perspectives of iconic characters like Little Red Riding Hood, as well as maligned or minor figures such as the Mole from Thumbelina and Cinderella’s stepsisters... A fiendishly clever and darkly funny collection.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A much-honored poet and novelist retells, in free verse and from various points of view, twenty-three familiar tales (mostly Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault). With a contemporary sensibility and voice, Koertge pitches directly to teenagers. . . Dezsö’s choice of cut-paper illustrations is brilliant, a nod to Hans C. Andersen’s skill in that medium despite the radically different tone.
—The Horn Book (starred review)

The poems beg to be shared aloud, like the best gossip. The sensibilities are wry, often dark, and the language is occasionally earthy... This slim volume is at once simple and sophisticated, witty and unnerving.
—School Library Journal

Sharp, ironic, and often darkly funny free verse.
—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Written in free verse, 23 fairy tales are explained by those “leftover” characters still hanging around in Ever After. This would be a wonderful supplement to a lesson about fairy tales, or an independent read if you still wonder if Little Bear really likes porridge. B&W illustrations add a unique sense of rawness to each tale.
—Library Media Connection (highly recommended)

These twenty-three contemporized fairy tales are darkly sophisticated and meant for older teens, likely already familiar with the popular originals and able to recognize and appreciate their humor and irony. Narrated by various characters in several formats, including blank verse, monologues, author accounts, or rhymes; a wickedly gruesome black-and-white illustration accompanies each witty retelling... All retellings hold surprises and are darker than the originals, but their uniqueness is shared poignancy; all sadly, and often chillingly, convey that each character’s first supposed “happily ever after” ending was merely a high-priced illusion.
—VOYA

Amputating the “happily” from “ever after,” Koertge’s collection of free-verse poems wrings 23 old favorites into terse puddles of queasiness, grim endings, and ambiguous moral takeaways (which, to be fair, means they’re not that far off from many of the originals)... Dezsö’s distinctive cut-paper silhouettes are dripping with grotesquery but also beautiful in their own indelible fashion. And they’re a perfect match for Koertge’s gritty, druggy, sexed-up visions.
—Booklist

Many authors have hammered fairy tales into something wicked, but after reading this collection, the words “Once upon a time . . .” will never sound the same again.
—BookPage

A dark retelling of classic fairy tales including Little Red Riding Hood and Rumpelstiltskin in free verse with a dash of gore and horror that updates the stories for a YA crowd.
—The Los Angeles Times

This entire book was like a box of the darkest chocolates. They held surprises inside and you simply can’t stop reading them.
—Waking Brain Cells blog

These illustrations are bold, haunting (in more ways than one), and bone-chilling in spots.
—Seven Impossible Things blog

From the Publisher

Gr 7 Up—It's not so happy in Ever After-at least not in Koertge's verses, which skew and skewer traditional fairy tales. Cinderella's stepsisters ("We have names, by the way. She's Sarah/and I'm Kathy…") are understandably disgruntled, but wouldn't you expect Rapunzel to be satisfied? Not so: "…I love my daughter. But the prince is moody and thinks/of himself. While the witch thought only of me." These characters have pretty modern sensibilities; the Little Match Girl is selling CDs, warming herself on their lyrics; Red Riding Hood rattles, "Fine, fine, fine. Do you want to hear this story or not? Good./So I'm in the woods and I hear footsteps or, like, pawsteps…." The poems beg to be shared aloud, like the best gossip. The sensibilities are wry, often dark, and the language is occasionally earthy. Dezsö's cut-paper illustrations extend the eldritch mix of folkloric material and macabre interpretations. This slim volume is at once simple and sophisticated, witty and unnerving.—Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Library, NY

School Library Journal

Short, brisk vignettes flip traditional fairy tales onto their backs. Twenty-three rewritings disclose dark secrets. Although each ostensibly has its own narrator, a lascivious narrative tone runs throughout. Dezsö matches that tone with black cut-out silhouettes of death and dismemberment, breasts unobscured. Incest recurs, as does kinky sexuality. Red Riding Hood, one example of the latter, reveals, "I was totally looking / forward to that part. With the wolf and all. I'm into danger, / okay?" Kink is rarely acknowledged in teen literature; it's unfortunate that these tales are too abrupt to address the topic meaningfully. The line-breaks of Koertge's free verse seem gratuitous. Sexual imagery includes both children (Hansel and Gretel "eat and eat, filling up the moist recesses / of their little bodies") and projected rape-fantasy (the Beast claims that Beauty "almost wanted / me to break her neck and open her / up like a purse"). Descriptions are incomprehensibly flip ("Oh, her skin is white as Wonder bread, / her little breasts like cupcakes!") or harsh ("a beautiful girl…not the usual chicken head ho"). The voice dances from incongruous humor ("it's weird inside a wolf, / all hot and moist but no worse than flying coach to Newark") to modernity forced into fairy-tale diction ("She'd slept over at their hovels"). Will catch some eyes, but this feels like edginess for edginess's sake, no deeper. (Fractured fairy tales. 14 & up)

Kirkus Reviews