Review Tuesday: The Sisters Grimm by Menna Van Praag - #ReviewTuesday #DarkFantasy #MoralAmbiguity

The Sisters Grimm by Menna Van Praag
Penguin/Random House, 2020

Each month at the first quarter moon, at 3.33 am precisely, gates that are normally locked open. When you step through one of these moonlight-frosted portals, you find yourself in another place, a magical world of perpetual night filled with fragrant forests, gleaming lakes and drifting white leaves – Everwhere.

If you’re a Grimm girl, though – one of the many daughters fathered by seductive demon Wilhelm Grimm on mortal women enticed by his dark charm – you don’t need gateways. You can visit Everwhere in your dreams every night, run barefoot among the ivy-twined trees, soar through the air like a bird of prey, know your own powers. At thirteen, you lose the ability to dream yourself into Everwhere, though the memories may linger. Then on your eighteenth birthday, you’re fated to meet your father among the swirl of pale foliage and he’ll force you to choose between the Darkness and the Light. If you resist the pull of evil and reject the darkness, one of your father’s many soldiers will extinguish you.

Four Grimm daughters born on the same day – October 31^st – find one another in Everwhere’s eternal twilight. Goldie is blonde as the sun, gifted with the ability to hear thoughts and call forth life from the earth. Red-headed Scarlet carries fire in her blood and sparks in her fingers. Chocolate-skinned, frizzy-haired Liyana, who’s come to England from Ghana, can breathe underwater. Raven-haired, cynical Bea has a mother who’s also a Grimm girl; she has known about her father from childhood, though she’s not sure she believes her mother’s crazy stories.

The Sisters Grimm is the haunting, intriguing and disturbing story of these four young women as they struggle to understand and accept their powers and their potential to do good or harm. They’re very different yet somehow each completes the others. As the days count down to their birthday and the night of the Choosing, they must come to terms with their destinies.

The narrative takes a while to make sense. It’s non-linear, flipping back and forth between the Grimm girls’ childhoods and the inexorable present, as the calendar marches toward the night of the Choosing. The point of view dances from one woman to another, too. This is occasionally confusing, especially when a section is labeled with one woman’s name who is being viewed and described from the perspective of another.

There’s also a tragic love story, told so beautifully it will bring tears to you eyes. I won’t say any more about this. You should discover it for yourself.

I’ve never read anything quite like The Sisters Grimm. (That’s a compliment.) It’s vivid and intense, full of dark magic and difficult questions. The prose is gorgeous and the characters brilliantly rendered. The tale raises philosophical and moral questions, without resolving them. Indeed, one begins to realize that even with the best intentions, it can be difficult to distinguish between darkness and light.

This is a book you won’t forget. Terrifying as Everwhere can be, you find yourself wanting to return, to feel again that sense of freedom, power and infinite possibility.