4 Stars
A YA/Horror retelling of the Hänsel and Gretel Fairytale.
This is the second modern fairytale retelling I have read recently and again it was a really good book. The tension builds up steadily and the witch has some quite gruesome and gory surprises for our cast of characters. Because in this version it is not just Hamish and Georgie (Hänsel and Gretel, if you haven’t guessed) who need to survive lost in the woods, but a whole cast of troubled teens on a survivalist challenge.
I was surprised how much I hated the stepmother, much more so than the witch. In the original fairytale she becomes kind of inconsequential once the children are lost, but the little snippets of what is happening outside of the forest that we get at the beginning of each chapter keep reminding us about her. I guess it’s because we are unlikely to ever meet a genuine evil witch that wants to eat children, but an evil stepmother? A false friend? A social media parenting expert peddling tough-love-parenting advice? You’ve probably met a few in your life.
Gingerbread Bones has the usual aspects of YA: Adults that are either useless in helping the teen protagonists or actively working against them, and more romance that you would expect in the given setting. I found some of the romance scenes a bit overdone, but I often think that in this genre, so that might be more a sign that I am too adult and younger-than-me adults will probably appreciate it more.
Comical warning to readers who speak German: the woodsman is called “Holz Leider”… Wood Unfortunately. I wonder what they’re going to do about that for the German translation
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