Smorgasbord Fantasia

Christina Henry has of late shifted her focus onto darker retelling of fairy tales - Alice and Red Queen, The Mermaid - and we love the decidedly un-disney like interpretations of the fairy tales. Grim tales steeped in dark atmospheric settings that will have your heart palpably beating real-fast as the narrative chugs on with manic speed towards that thrilling finale. And so when I got the invite to review The Girl in Red , posed as a different spin on the red riding hood and the wolf story, I jumped for it. But as I read the initial few chapters, I realized that as usual, Christina has taken an axe to our preconceptions about how this story of the girl in the woods who meets the wolf, will turn out to be. Red , birth name Cordelia, is a twenty-something young girl on a long hike through the woods and abandoned forests somewhere in the US, trudging through to get to her grandmother's house (Yup: A cabin in the woods, that remains true!) after the whole world has been des...

Christina Henry 's darker take on the fairy tales has been nothing short of riveting. I personally was a huge fan of Alice and this summer, Christina ups the ante, with The Girl in Red - a terrifying post-apocalyptic take on Little Red Riding Hood. Check out the amazingly gorgeous cover: Here's the official blurb: From the national bestselling author of Alice comes a post-apocalyptic take on the perennial classic "Little Red Riding Hood"...about a woman who isn't as defenseless as she seems. It's not safe for anyone alone in the woods. There are predators that come out at night: critters and coyotes, snakes and wolves. But the woman in the red jacket has no choice. Not since the Crisis came, decimated the population, and sent those who survived fleeing into quarantine camps that serve as breeding grounds for death, destruction, and disease. She is just a woman trying not to get killed in a world that doesn't look anything like the one she gr...

July marking the beginning of the second half of the year, is another manic month of releases - and in a way I realize, this year is going to be one of my worst years in terms of reading/reviewing. I am already at least 10 books behind schedule with respect to my goal. And to add to that, I have decided to focus and finish off this one trilogy by one of my all time favorite authors, Mark Lawrence ( The Red Queen's War ) - am so mired into that universe of the Red March and the Broken Empire, that I am forcing myself to slow down - to relish not just his beautiful writing but the amazing depths of the world that Mark has built - a sort-of post-apocalyptic world, where the Builders' artifacts turn up surprises and shocks quite a few times, lending a new twist to the storyline. But enough of Prince Jalan Kendeth and his world - Back to some of the books in July that I am looking forward to ( and I am consciously keeping this list a bit short, so to focus on my backlogs as well i...

Retellings of classics have the potential to be spectacular or disastrous. Alice in Wonderland has been tried before - though I confess I haven't read the written form of such retelling but having watched a few adaptations on TV I came away sorely disappointed. Like the big screen never could justify that mad gleam in the Hatter's eyes - as matched perhaps by the twisty imagination of one such as Lewis Caroll. And with this book, Alice - Christina Henry takes a swan dive into that deep dark rabbit-hole and definitely emerges a winner! A book that is dark as sin and racy as hell on jet-fire, Alice is a masterful and disturbing retelling of the classic laced over with many layers of darkness and intrigue. Magic is unexplained as in a fairy tale - but one for kids, this is not. It's a fairy tale gone horribly wrong - more a fantastical thriller set in a madman's darkest nightmarish setting called the Old City, a far cry from the Wonderland. The story starts in a ...