Discoveries

The True Story of

Hansel and Gretel

A Novel of War and Survival

Louise Murphy

Penguin Originals: 298 pp., $13

*

“Hansel and Gretel” uses the structure and the mythology of the original fairy tale to tell the story of two children sent into the woods by their stepmother to avoid being slaughtered by the Nazis. Every second is so terrifying, so filled with the breathtaking, sometimes death-defying contortions of war, a reader almost needs the fairy tale to lean on.

Somehow, the children must survive, along with witch Magda, who takes them in. If the story slavishly followed the fairy tale, we’d never keep reading. “Do not struggle,” the author warns in the prologue, “when the hook of a word pulls you into the air of truth and you cannot breathe. For a little while, I ask this of you.”

Gretel is 11 and Hansel is 7 when they are given these false German-sounding names by their father and stepmother. “He was not himself anymore,” thought Hansel, absorbing his new name. “He was not the little Jew who hid in the grease pit.” In a forest clearing is Magda’s house, covered with bread crumbs for the birds. There they live for several happy years while their stepmother and father join a group of resistance fighters. The fairy tale is history repeating itself; new forms of inhumanity rising like mythical monsters are defeated. Then new monsters arrive, new Nazis and the story is retold around a different hearth.

*

The Lost Souls’ Reunion

Suzanne Power

St. Martin’s Press: 319 pp., $24.95

*

“She had expected nothing and got worse than that.” So begins a tale of woe and suffering passed from one generation to the next until three women, full of magic and willpower, are able to stop it.

When Noreen married a cruel farmer, it was her only choice besides prostitution, even in early 20th century Ireland. Her daughter, Carmel, with fiery red hair, a child of the coast and forest, is sent away from her father’s violence to make her way in London, where she becomes a prostitute. She, in turn, has a child with her ponce. The cycle continues until Carmel’s daughter, Sive, is in her teens and her grandmother, free now that the farmer has died, comes to help them. After Noreen’s death, the women move back to the house by the “pewter sea” in which it all began.

One by one, the lost souls are healed. Carmel’s heart is softened and kneaded after decades of prostitution. Sive allows herself to fall in love. The ghost of Noreen guides them. This is young writing, somewhere between myth and story. The loose ends are still tied with forgiveness where they might not be in more experienced hands. Instead, there is a feeling of fullness and possibility where there might otherwise be despair.

*

Indelible Acts

A.L. Kennedy

Knopf: 191 pp., $23

*

RANDY, crabby and dangerous to read, Kennedy is even less earnest than her trailblazing predecessor, Jeanette Winterson. But sex still is a political act here, when the girl doesn’t want it and even when she does.

In this collection, she creates characters so trapped in their own minds that it becomes amazing to watch them leave the house in the morning, much less connect in any meaningful way with another human being. There’s Howie, obsessively in love with his boss, Brian; Greg, trapped in his feelings for his mistress, Amanda, who is just in it for the sex; and Ronnie, a little boy training to be a “bad son,” toughening body and heart against the day when he will free his mother once and for all from his violent father. “Fear always changed to something different, you just had to wait,” he thinks.

Kennedy is a master of the whomping good phrase. Lines like “the horrible fraying of his time” or “The firmness of his shadow stretching, snug beneath him” extend the radius around these characters just enough for a reader to be able to step inside their suffocating worlds. But hey, don’t let that stop you.