Gretel and the dark

Title:

Gretel and the dark

Author:

Granville, Eliza.

Personal Author:

Granville, Eliza.

ISBN:

9781594632556

Edition:

First American edition.

Physical Description:

341 pages ; 24 cm

Abstract:

Decades after a celebrated Viennese psychoanalyst begins working with a woman who claims to be a machine, a young girl retreats into fairy tales, unaware of the dangers in her Nazi-controlled German city.

Subject Term:

Psychoanalysis and fairy tales -- Fiction.

Psychoanalysts -- Fiction.

Imagination -- Fiction.

Fairy tales -- Fiction.

Girls -- Fiction.

Genre:

Psychological fiction.

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Belmont	Book	FICTION GRANVIL	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

A captivating and atmospheric historical novel about a young girl in Nazi Germany, a psychoanalyst in fin-de-si#65533;cle Vienna, and the powerful mystery that links them together.

Gretel and the Dark explores good and evil, hope and despair, showing how the primal thrills and horrors of the stories we learn as children can illuminate the darkest moments in history, in two rich, intertwining narratives that come together to form one exhilarating, page-turning read. In 1899 Vienna, celebrated psychoanalyst Josef Breuer is about to encounter his strangest case yet: a mysterious, beautiful woman who claims to have no name, no feelings--to be, in fact, a machine. Intrigued, he tries to fathom the roots of her disturbance.

Years later, in Nazi-controlled Germany, Krysta plays alone while her papa works in the menacingly strange infirmary next door. Young, innocent, and fiercely stubborn, she retreats into a world of fairy tales, unable to see the danger closing in around her. When everything changes and the real world becomes as frightening as any of her stories, Krysta finds that her imagination holds powers beyond what she could ever have guessed.

Rich, compelling, and propulsively building to a dizzying final twist, Gretel and the Dark is a testament to the lifesaving power of the imagination and a mesmerizingly original story of redemption.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

British newcomer Granville pits storytelling against the Holocaust in a pair of alternating narratives whose connection is obvious from the start.When Dr. Josef Breuers description of the young woman found nearly dead on the grounds of an abandoned Viennese mental hospital includes mention of a shaved head and a line of inked characters on her left arm, we know that she is somehow a concentration camp survivor, even though the year is 1899. Lilie, as Josef calls her, has come to find the monsterand we know who that is, even before she asks Josef to take her to Linz because the monster will be too big by the time he comes to Vienna. Its also clear in the narration of an unpleasant girl named Krysta that we have moved into the Third Reich years. Krysta lives on the outskirts of a camp where her Papa performs medical experiments on the inmates; its about as plausible that she would strike up a friendship with one of these animal-people, a boy named Daniel, as it is that she would suddenly be placed in the camp herself after her guilt-stricken fathers death. Readers are basically waiting to find out how someone from the 1940s appeared in fin de sicle Vienna, and those who paid attention to the novels prologue will figure it out long before the authors explanation in the last five pages. Granville creates an appropriately dark atmosphere, from Josefs distasteful attraction to the vulnerable Lilie to the gruesome fairy tales Krysta heard from their housekeeper, Greet, before she and Papa came to the infirmary. The author aspires to assert the power of imagination to help people cope with dire circumstances, but her setup is so blatant, her characters so predetermined, that her use of the Holocaust seems like a gimmick rather than a genuine effort to deepen our understanding.Dealing in fiction with a subject of such moral and physical enormity requires a level of rigor and care not achieved in this overly pat novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.