Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

by Gregory Maguire

Overview

The author of the beloved New York Times bestseller Wicked returns with an inventive novel inspired by a timeless holiday legend, intertwining the story of the famous Nutcracker with the life of the mysterious toy maker named Drosselmeier who carves him.

Hiddensee: An island of white sandy beaches, salt marshes, steep cliffs, and pine forests north of Berlin in the Baltic Sea, an island that is an enchanting bohemian retreat and home to a large artists' colony— a wellspring of inspiration for the Romantic imagination . . .

Having brought his legions of devoted readers to Oz in Wicked and to Wonderland in After Alice, Maguire now takes us to the realms of the Brothers Grimm and E. T. A. Hoffmann— the enchanted Black Forest of Bavaria and the salons of Munich. Hiddensee imagines the backstory of the Nutcracker, revealing how this entrancing creature came to be carved and how he guided an ailing girl named Klara through a dreamy paradise on a Christmas Eve. At the heart of Hoffmann's mysterious tale hovers Godfather Drosselmeier— the ominous, canny, one-eyed toy maker made immortal by Petipa and Tchaikovsky's fairy tale ballet— who presents the once and future Nutcracker to Klara, his goddaughter.

But Hiddensee is not just a retelling of a classic story. Maguire discovers in the flowering of German Romanticism ties to Hellenic mystery-cults— a fascination with death and the afterlife— and ponders a profound question: How can a person who is abused by life, shortchanged and challenged, nevertheless access secrets that benefit the disadvantaged and powerless? Ultimately, Hiddensee offers a message of hope. If the compromised Godfather Drosselmeier can bring an enchanted Nutcracker to a young girl in distress on a dark winter evening, perhaps everyone, however lonely or marginalized, has something precious to share.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780594899679
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/31/2017
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Gregory Maguire is the New York Times bestselling author of the Wicked Years, a series that includes Wicked—the beloved classic that is the basis for the blockbuster Tony Award–winning Broadway musical of the same name and the major motion picture—Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz. His series Another Day continues the story of Oz with The Brides of Maracoor, The Oracle of Maracoor, and The Witch of Maracoor, and his other novels include A Wild Winter Swan, Hiddensee, After Alice, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Lost, and Mirror Mirror. He lives in New England and France.

Hometown:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

June 9, 1954

Place of Birth:

Albany, New York

Education:

B.A., SUNY at Albany, 1976; M.A., Simmons College, 1978; Ph.D., Tufts University, 1990

Website:

http://www.gregorymaguire.com

Editorial Reviews

Maguire’s characteristic tone is dark and enchanting in his newest fairy tale revision... a powerful story of hope and redemption sure to delight his fans.” — Booklist (starred review)

“Enchanting, mystical and filled with wonder, it’s the perfect holiday fairy tale for grown-ups.” — People

“An inventive, and often dark, retelling of the holiday classic.” — BuzzFeed News

“Continuing his tradition of rewriting fairy tales with an arch eye and offbeat point of view, Maguire turns his attention to Lewis Carroll and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland…A brilliant and nicely off-kilter reading of the children’s classic, retrofitted for grown-ups—and a lot of fun.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the Publisher

Maguire’s characteristic tone is dark and enchanting in his newest fairy tale revision... a powerful story of hope and redemption sure to delight his fans.

Booklist (starred review)

Enchanting, mystical and filled with wonder, it’s the perfect holiday fairy tale for grown-ups.

People

An inventive, and often dark, retelling of the holiday classic.

BuzzFeed News

Enchanting, mystical and filled with wonder, it’s the perfect holiday fairy tale for grown-ups.

People Magazine

10/15/2017
The author of Wicked and After Alice has written an origin fairy tale for toymaker Drosselmeier and the famous Nutcracker he creates, the protagonists of an E.T.A. Hoffman story that was later transformed into Tchaikovsky's famous ballet. The novel begins with Drosselmeier's beginnings as a young foundling, living in the forest with an old couple. A fateful trip to fell a tree sets the boy on a winding path with a magical knife. He finds shelter and work along the way and eventually begins a long friendship and possibly something more with Felix Stahlbaum, grandfather of Fritz and Marie-Claire, commonly known as Klara, and the recipient of the magical Nutcracker. VERDICT Maguire combines the Greek myth of Pan and Pythia with the dark undertones of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, resulting in a strangely fascinating reimagining of how the Nutcracker came to be. Lovers of classical retellings and the author's other books will admire. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/17.]

Library Journal

With a storyteller’s ease and a bit of a wink and a nod, narrator Steven Crossley leads the listener on a dark, wild, and altogether strange adventure. A cast-off woodcutter’s son who sets out to seek his fortune as a toy maker meets a menagerie of fairy-tale creatures, musicians, and milkmaids along the way. The tale combines the darker strains of the Brothers Grimm with a hardscrabble view of early-nineteenth-century German peasant life, and without Crossley’s light vocal touch, it might have collapsed under its own weight. Instead, Crossley accentuates the hopeful and redemptive tones that arise when a child finds a hand-carved nutcracker under the Christmas tree. This folktale is decidedly not for children, but for more for thoughtful adults. B.P. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2017 - AudioFile

★ 2017-08-14
A delightful, mystical, mythical confection by zeitgeist whisperer Maguire (After Alice, 2015, etc.), who likes nothing more than to work at the dark edges of a fairy tale. As evidenced especially in Wicked and its sequels, Maguire has a sharp appreciation for what struck Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm way back when: especially if they're German, the stories we tell our children are marvels of mayhem, compressed slices of violence and bleakness gussied up with an occasional shiny poisoned apple. In them, death is always present. So it is with this latest foray, in which Maguire locates a perhaps unwilling hero in a young foundling, Dirk Drosselmeier, who, having courted death himself, proves to be inept enough with an ax at his adopted woodcutter father's house to be packed off into the world—narrowly avoiding death, it seems, at the hands of the old man and his wicked-witchish wife. "He's witnessed enough to be scared already, I can't make it worse," she cackles, and off he goes. But the world has plenty of terrors of its own to offer, including the fact that everyone he loves will die or otherwise leave him. He learns to live on his own wits and resources; "I'm more like a spider," he says, "I cling with strings and hooks only to every passing day." Improbably, in the face of all that sorrow and odd encounters with the likes of the quack Doctor Mesmer, he makes good; he wasn't so handy with a hatchet, but with smaller blades he carves out a formidable nutcracker that evolves, in his hands, "from it to he." Shades of Pinocchio! It's at this juncture that, as if a mist lifting, the darkness of the story brightens and, magically, the familiar story that we know from Tchaikovsky's Christmas classic, Klara and the King of Mice and all, resolves with brilliant clarity. It's a fine bit of sorcery on Maguire's part, but of course, as all things must, it ends darkly. A splendid revisitation of folklore that takes us to and from familiar cultural touchstones into realms to make Freud blanch. Wonderful.

Kirkus Reviews