The Land of Stories – A Grimm Warning

Chris Colfer's The Land of Stories - A Grimm Warning is a fairy tale adventure for 9 year olds that opens in 1811, in a dark forest, with two real brothers in very real trouble.

What happens

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are dragged into a French army tent with sacks over their heads. A general wants to know where their stories actually come from. He has been watching them. He knows about the sparkling woman with the crystal wand who brings them a new tale every time she visits.

He also has a solid gold egg, and a caged wagon, and two months of patience.

Then the book jumps to now, and to Conner Bailey packing for a school trip to Berlin at half past midnight, having decided that twelve pairs of socks is about right for three days because there might be puddles in Europe. He very nearly forgets trousers.

His twin sister Alex is not going. Alex lives in the fairy world, training to join the Fairy Council, and the two of them talk through a golden mirror. They chip a corner off each mirror so they can carry each other about like a video call.

Alex's day job is granting three wishes before noon, and she is dreadful at it. She turns three girls' clothes into new dresses and gets told the pink is wrong, then the yellow, then the collar. She refills a dry well and produces a geyser.

That is the pleasure of it. Enormous stakes in one chapter, a boy worrying about socks in the next, and a fairy in training apologising to a unicorn with a broken horn who eats his feelings.

Now the things a parent will want to know. The prologue is properly menacing. Both brothers are cut and bruised before they arrive, one spits blood, and the general finishes by promising to make them watch while he kills everyone they love. It's the whole of the opening and it isn't softened.

Mother Goose is a comic drunk. She wakes up in a cage, works out she was "over-served" at her favourite alehouse, and is later found asleep in a garden with a flask. Some households will find that funny and some would rather it wasn't there.

The twins are thirteen and fourteen. The sentences and the jokes are pitched much younger than that, but your reader is following teenagers, and the flirting-with-Bree blushing is teenage too.

One practical point. This one sits well into the series. Conner refers to a previous adventure, Alex has already defeated an enchantress, and the family are lying to the school about where she has gone. The first book isn't in the library, so your reader starts partway in.

What to read next

If your reader wants to know what the Brothers Grimm were actually writing down, The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales is here too. These are the older, sharper versions rather than the tidied-up ones. The princess doesn't kiss the frog. She throws him at a wall.