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.

H.I.V.E; Zero Hour. By Mark Walden. London, Bloomsbury, 2010

In the first novel of this series, H.I.V.E: Higher Institute of Villainous Education, we met Otto Malpense, a computer genius who also had the uncanny power of connecting with computers, who found himself in H.I.V.E, a sort of Hogwarts for training super-villains, after showing his skills by making the Prime Minister drop his trousers on national television. There, he meets other young criminal geniuses who become his friends. The original novel was very funny indeed, throwing in cheeky references to spy movies, such as the white cat with a jewelled collar that sits in the villain’s lap; at H.I.V.E, the white cat is one of the teachers, who had been trapped in her cat’s body by accident, and the jewelled collar is her communication device. The “Neville Longbottom” character created a giant plant that almost ate the school.

As the novels continued, the humour mostly disappeared, to be replaced by straight action adventure with a speculative fiction twist. The main villain of the series was an AI called Overlord, which had gotten out of control and wanted to take over the world. We did eventually find out why Otto had those abilities and in the last book, H.I.V.E: Rogue, Otto was taken by the enemy and taken over for most of the story.

In this latest offering, the baddies – and you have to remember that everyone in this series is technically a baddie – take over the school and scatter the council of GLOVE, the organisation governing the “good” baddies who just want to make lots of money, not rule the world. They take hostages at a secret American military base and start issuing orders to the president. Now Otto, his friends Laura, Lucy, Shelby and Wing and the school’s headmaster, Max Nero, are on the run, fortunately in a fabulous piece of technology called Megalodon, trying to stop Overlord, who has demanded Otto as part of the price of releasing those hostages. If Overlord wins this time, everyone in the world will be taken over. But Max Nero has one ace left up his sleeve – something known as Zero Hour, planned years ago…

I suppose I can see why the over-the-top humour was dropped after the first novel, apart from the occasional amusing scene. The point had been made and after that, it wouldn’t work any more. The story wasn’t finished. So the direction changed and the last few books, this one included, are more like the many action-adventures being written for teenagers in recent years. This series is likely to appeal to teens who have been reading Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider novels and Charlie Higson’s Young James Bond books. There is an appendix at the end, which invites readers to find out for which stream of H.I.V.E they would be suitable, then whether they have what it takes to be a super-villain anyway. I got into the Political/Financial Stream, but wasn’t quite villainous for the big time.

The series has gotten to the point where books can't be read stand-alone, so read the others first. It's worth the effort.

Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony By Eoin Colfer. Published by Penguin Books.

ARTEMIS FOWL AND THE LOST COLONY By Eoin Colfer

When Artemis Fowl first came out, it was, as usual for children’s books at the time, acclaimed as being just like Harry Potter. Come to think of it, that’s still happening today - if it’s a fantasy story and the main character is a boy, it’s Harry Potter, please buy it. Which is a pity, because I think the Artemis Fowl books, at least, will become classics in their own right and attract their own audiences, without any need of support from J.K. Rowling.

Of course, this series isn’t remotely like the Potter books. About all the protagonists have in common is that they’re both eleven year old boys in the first book and grow up in the course of the series. The same can be said of The Dark Is Rising, which was written long before either the Potter or the Fowl books and even has a wizardly mentor (Merlin, actually, still around in modern Britain) - so what?

Harry was a good boy, having adventures with his friends. Artemis was a young criminal genius. He didn’t, at the time, have any friends except his bodyguard, Butler, who genuinely cared about him. While Harry was trying to save the world by finding and destroying the philosopher’s stone, which confers immortality and turns base metal into gold, Artemis was busy kidnapping a fairy, in order to steal gold from her people. Just like Harry Potter? Hardly!

Now we’ve got that out of the way, on to the review.

Fairies in this universe are technologically advanced centuries beyond humans, though they’re magical beings who need contact with the earth to keep themselves going, but have been driven underground long ago. Still, these fairies kick ass, especially their police force, the LEPrecon (get it?). The fairy races are many things, but cute and sweet are not among them. Take the dwarfs, for example. They tunnel by unhinging their jaws and eating their way through the soil - and of course, the gas has to come out somewhere, to help propel them along, hence the “bumflap” in the dwarf’s garment... Ouch!

I haven’t read an Artemis Fowl novel for some time - the last one was the second, in fact. This novel is the fifth and it makes me want to go back and fill in the gaps. I found myself falling comfortably back into the universe. One character, alas, has died since the last time I read a Fowl novel. Artemis is now fourteen and has matured. He’s made friends among the fairies, including the one he kidnapped in Book 1, and is starting, shock horror, to act like a good guy! Oh, yes, and trying to handle puberty.

Just as well, then, that there’s another junior criminal genius to attract him, a sort of female Artemis called Minerva. To be fair, Minerva doesn’t want to harm anybody or steal anything, she just wants to be the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize for physics and has no problem with grabbing a magical being to do it. The trouble is, her ambitions might, unintentionally, destroy an entire lost fairy race, the demons. Time is running out to save them, and Artemis and his friends are relying on a small imp who’s the last demon warlock alive...

A series like this could quite easily have gone downhill by Book 5, but it hasn’t. You really want to know what happens next and this one has an ending that lets you know, quite clearly, that there’s more to come and that the author has been thinking quite carefully about Artemis’s future. After all, he is a teenager now, one who is starting to notice girls, but he needs a girl with his own intelligence. It would have worked better if Minerva had played a larger role in the events at the novel’s climax, but I’d be very surprised if she wasn’t back in the next book.

There’s a “gnommish" alphabet at the end of the book, with a long message throughout the book, disguised as a pretty border. Anna Ciddor’s Viking trilogy had rune messages in it, but at least she put them at the end of each chapter. Runes might have worked better in this one than the picture-based letters, because children can actually copy runes and write their own messages. Oh, well.

Excuse me, I’m off to make my way through the book again, to see what the message says...