Friday, April 07, 2006

The Sister's Grimm: The Fairy-Tale Detectives

I just finished reading The Sisters Grimm: The Fairy-Tale Detectives last night. The book will completely enrapture most kids.

Sisters Sabrina (11) and Daphne (7) live in an orphanage and fosters homes after their parents mysterious disappearance, only to be claimed by a grandmother they have never heard of (sound a little like Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events to anyone else?). The girls are wary of their grandmother Relda when she tells them that they are descendants of the Grimm's who wrote Grimm's fairy-tales and they are real historical records, not fictitious stories. Their doubts are quickly swept away when Relda is kidnapped by a giant and they are left to save her.

The book does have many similarities to The Series of unfortunate Events: Missing parents, intriguing characters who will benefit from the death of the Grimm sisters, vocabulary definitions slyly slipped into the text, even a similar hardback binding with uneven pages. But it doesn't carry the same sense of doom and gloom and still has a lot of originality that will delight readers. I had so much fun identifying all of the fairy-tale characters living in Relda's small town. There's already a second book out in this series and I'm sure children will be pleased to find more to come.

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