Reviews: Gingerbread (3)

I felt oddly drawn into this book, despite my initial belief that it would be a slow and overdrawn out story.
I can't begin to tell you how wrong I was! The book follows the tragic story of a boy's family, which has led them to live in the forest. Thus you follow the boy's narrative whilst Dinsdale juxtaposes this with his Grandfather's fairytales of a similar boy in the woods.
The final 50 pages had me racing through and I was quite sorry to reach the end.

The five star system doesn't seem to be adequate when it comes to books like this. Having read Little Exiles, I was expecting this to be good, but couldn't anticipate just how well written, and horrifying the novel would be. Robert Dinsdale has taken a story of loss and emotional trauma, and wrapped it up in the history and folktales of Belarus to create something quite exceptional. Alek is a young boy determined to honour the last requests made by his dying mother; to protect his 'Papa' and to return her ashes to the forest cottage where she was born. Alek cannot possibly imagine the horrors that have taken place in the forests of Belarus, or the effect that this history will have on his grandfather. The tragic story of Alek's family, and of his country, is slowly revealed through the 'fairy-tales' told by ‘Papa’; and as the pair become increasingly distanced from the modern world, these dark tales begin to have a horrific impact on both of them. This is an unforgiving book, as brutal and twisted as the stories that weave through the lives of Alek and his Papa, and yet remains one of the most perfectly beautiful things I have read this year. A darIt’s an incredible work.

Every expectation I had for this novel was turned on its head. This is a stunning story, a fairy tale twisted around a narrative of a boy and his grandfather on a journey into the woods, and a spiral into madness. Dark and sometimes gruesome, but I truly didn't want it to end.