In a Glass Grimmly (A Tale Dark & Grimm)

Accolades for A Tale Dark & Grimm : • New York Times bestseller• Selection on the Today Show’s Al’s Book Club for Kids• NCTE Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts Selection• An E. B. White Read Aloud Honor Book• New York Times Editors’ Choice pick• Publishers Weekly Flying Start• School Library Journal Best Book of the Year• ALA Notable Bookxa0“Unlike any children’s book I’ve ever read . . . [it] holds up to multiple re-readings, like the classic I think it will turn out to be.”— New York Times Book Review “A marvelous reworking of old stories that manages to be fresh, frightening, funny, and humane.”— Wall Street Journal Accolades for In a Glass Grimmly : • New York Times bestseller• A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2012• A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012• A School Librry Journal Best Book of 2012xa0xa0“Gidwitz is back with a second book that, if possible, outshines A Tale Dark & Grimm .”— School Library Journal , starred reviewxa0xa0“Compulsively readable.”— Kirkus Reviews , starred reviewxa0“Gory, hilarious, touching, and lyrical all at once, with tons of kid appeal.”— The Horn Book “Adam Gidwitz leads us into creepy forests, gruesome deeds, terrible monsters, and—far worse—the dark places of the human heart. It’s horrible . . . and I LOVED it!”—Tom Angleberger, author of The Strange Case of Origami Adam Gidwitz taught in Brooklyn for eight years. Now, he writes full time—which means he writes a couple of hours a day, and lies on his couch staring at the ceiling the rest of the time. As is the case with all of his books, everything in them not only happened in the real fairy tales…it all also happened to him. Really. Learn more at www.adamgidwitz.com, on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter: @AdamGidwitz Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Fairy tales were, in a word, horrible. Two hundred years ago, in Germany, the Brothers Grimm first wrote down that version of Cinderella in which the stepsisters slice off pieces of their feet and get their eyes pecked out. In England, a man names Joseph Jacobs collected tales like Jack the Giant Killer, which is about a boy named Jack who goes around murdering giants in the most gruesome and grotesque ways imaginable. And there was this guy called Hans Christian Andersen, who lived in Denmark and wrote fairy tales filled with sadness and humiliation and loneliness. Even Mother Goose’s rhymes could get pretty dark—after all, Jack and Jill go up a hill, and then Jack falls down and breaks his head open.Yes, fairy tales were horrible. In the original sense of the word.But even these horrible fairy tales and nursery rhymes aren’t true. They’re just stories. Right?Not exactly. Read more