Just Finished Reading... The Beast's Garden by Kate Forsyth. VintageBooks Australia, 2015

                                                           

I had been looking forward to reading this, ever since I heard that Kate Forsyth was doing a novel based on "Beauty And The Beast", set in Nazi Germany. 

It was worth the wait, though I should explain that it's not exactly "Beauty And The Beast", but rather a B&B variation in the Grimms' second collection, "The Singing, Springing Lark". That one starts off like B&B, though the girl has asked her father to bring her a lark rather than a rose and the Beast is a lion. That's where it ends - the rest of the story is quite different and the heroine has to do quite a lot of tasks to get her beloved Beast back, more like Cupid And Psyche and some other fairytales of the kind where a rival lets her have access to his room in exchange for a bauble of some kind, but makes sure he's asleep.  So, yes, the heroine of this book, Ava, has an adventure, but the author does throw in a lot of references to roses, as in B&B.  

Ava is the daughter of a university professor who is not crazy about the Nazis. Neither is she, and on the Night Of Broken Glass(Kristallnacht) she is out trying to help the Jewish family which has pretty much been her own since her mother, an opera singer, died. She says some rather reckless things to a young Nazi officer, but fortunately he is secretly anti-Nazi and helps the family by sending the bullies smashing up the family's home on their way. His name is Leo(as in lion) and this is the beginning of their romance and eventual marriage.

The rest of the novel shows Germany going downhill, while Ava watches in horror and tries to help her Jewish friends and others. Leo is involved in a plot to kill Hitler - no spoiler here as it's on the cover blurb - and their lives are dangerous and frightening. It's amazing how many attempts there were to kill Hitler apart from the most famous one. He managed to survive them all before his date with destiny in the bunker.Ava is a good, strong heroine, without having to be "kick-ass"(though she dies do some physical stuff towards the end). She spends the novel doing anti-Nazi activities with her friends, some of whom are real historical figures.

If you know about the fairytale, you should be able to spot the connections easily enough. If you don't know, it doesn't matter - it works just fine as a historical novel with a lot of adventure. 

I hadn't realised how many of the characters were real people, but tried not to look them up before finishing the book, to avoid my own spoilers. I did look up some places, such as the Adlon hotel, where Ava performs early in the book. Apparently it's still there and is a Berlin icon, a bit like our Windsor hotel in Melbourne. 

I was, however, familiar with some things mentioned. Flossenburg concentration camp, which appears in the later chapters of the book, was where my father was imprisoned and used as slave labour. It meant I had some emotional connections with the book, apart from the Holocaust itself. 

I read this in ebook - I find it hard to put off gratification these days - but by now it will be available in all good bookshops and I do recommend it! 

The Wild Girl by Kate Forsyth. Sydney, Random House Australia, 2013

There must be something in the air here in Australia. There are all these women writing amazing fiction with fairy tale themes. I can think of four without any trouble: Sophie Masson, author of several YA novels based on such folk tales as Tattercoats, Sleeping Beauty and, most recently,"Aschenputtel", the German version of “Cinderella”. Juliet Marillier, author of the Sevenwaters series that began with Daughter Of The Forest(“The Wild Swans”) and Heart's Blood(“Beauty And The Beast”). Margo Lanagan, with Tender Morsels (“Snow White And Rose Red”) and, of course, Sea Hearts, which is on the Stella short list, two sections of the Aurealises and the Ditmars. In the last year there has been the Specusphere anthology, Mythic Resonance, which had folk tale-inspired stories both by women and men.

And there's now Kate Forsyth, best known for her children's books, who has written two novels in a row on fairy tale themes. Bitter Greens (on both the Aurealis and Ditmars list this year)  was about the young woman who wrote a version of the Rapunzel story back in the seventeenth century, intertwined with the Rapunzel tale itself. That one was historical fantasy; The Wild Girl is straight historical fiction centred around those collectors of tales, the Brothers Grimm, as seen by the girl next door, Dortchen Wild, who would eventually marry one of them and told them about a quarter of the stories in their collection. But the fairy tales are there anyway, again intertwined with the main story, though not in exactly the same way as in Bitter Greens. There are quotes from the stories Dortchen Wild told Wilhelm Grimm, caerfully connected with whatever is happening in that part of the novel.

Dortchen Wild, daughter of an apothecary and no mean herbalist herself, falls in love with Wilhelm Grimm when she is just twelve and he a few years older. He is the big brother of her best friend Lotte, kind and handsome and probably doesn't know she exists, except as someone who knows many of the folk tales he and his brother Jakob are collecting.

But the years go by. Napoleon invades. The small German country of Hesse become the kingdom of Westphalia, ruled by Napoleon's extravagant and heedless younger brother, Jerome. The Grimms and Dortchen's family have a lot more to worry about than a romance that might or might not happen. And Dortchen has been abused horribly by her father, one of the nastier characters I have come across in fiction recently.

This is a wonderful piece of historical fiction. It is based on an idea expressed by Valerie Paradiz in Clever Maids:The Secret History Of The Grimm Fairy Tales, that the Grimm brothers got their stories, not from illiterate peasants and old grannies at the spinning wheel, but from middle class, educated young women of their acquaintance, starting with the girl next door.

As with  all good historical fiction, history has been interpreted. There will always be some things we don't know, and when that happens, the author has to pull together the facts we do know and come to a conclusion. This has been done very well, so that I read it and thought,"Yes, this could really be how it happened." The author has taken only a few minor bits of license, which she mentions in her afterword, but she has done it intelligently. She has researched the period and the people thoroughly and made it all believable. It's strange, reading it, to imagine that all this was going on while the Regency was happening in England and Jane Austen was writing gentle, witty romances.

I hadn’t realised that the first edition of the Grimm stories was a flop. Live and learn!

 Another thing: I always thought the Grimm stories were nastier and more violent than their counterparts in other countries, but this isn't always the case. While reading The Wild Girl I was comparing Grimm stories with those of Perrault and others. “Sleeping Beauty” in Grimm ends with the princess and her prince wandering off happily into the sunset; the French Perrault story doesn't and with the princess awakening. She has a monster for a mother-in-law - literally! One who tries to eat her and her children. “Aschenputtel” has some gruesome bits, but at least Grimm's Cinderella isn't a murderer like her Italian counterpart, Cenerentola, whom I discovered on Sur La Lune Fairy Tales. The story of “Little Red Riding Hood” is nastier in the French version.

Whether you love fairy tales or historical fiction or romance, there is something for you in The Wild Girl.

Available now in all good bookshops in Australia or you can buy it online here. If you have an iPhone or iPad, you can get it in the iBooks store.