The Woodcutter

The Woodcutter lives in the Wood connecting the Twelve Kingdoms, keeping the peace between humans and the fae. One night he comes across the body of a princess with glass slippers, and shortly after those of a little girl in a red cape and her grandmother; all of them didn't have a mark on them but had been mortally afraid. Knowing that something terrible stalks the Wood, he sets off to defeat it, and uncovers a terrible conspiracy.

This short novel reads very much like an old-fashioned fairy tale, with Kate Danley's economic yet poetic prose taking you back in time to your childhood when the stories of princes and princesses and true love's first kiss, enchanted woods, witches and evil queens were as familiar to you as the back of your show more hand, giving you a first taste of good and bad, right and wrong, love and death. She takes all those stories and mixes them together into something new, and half the fun to me was recognising old friends. Her characters have true emotional depth, in particular the titular figure of the Woodcutter himself, and I warmed to him immediately. Even though it's impossible not to read the final few chapters without thinking of religious symbolism, by the end I was in tears, and if the story doesn't move you, then you truly have a heart of stone and deserve no better. I believe this is one of those books that gets better at each re-reading as you discover references and nuances you missed before. show less

If you like retellings of fairy tales, you will probably like this. I certainly enjoyed reading it, but by the time I was getting to the end I had some reservations.

The main problem I had with the book was that there was no real causality. It was dreamlike in that way. If something bad happened, you didn't have to worry, because ~*~magic~*~ would set things right again in some unforeseen way. The characters were paper-thin, too, so it was impossible to get invested in the narrative. The saving grace was that it was easy to get swept along by the words. (Jan 2015)

I read this book while holidaying in Cypress. I finished it in two days which is a reflection of how good it is. I can spend months reading a book I'm not keen on and have been known to cheekily take a sneak peak at Wikipedia for the synopsis to bluff my way through a Reading Group evening....

The story was beautifully written and at one point I thought to myself it was like poetry. I'm not a fan of poetry normally but the way the story unfolded evoked emotions and reveries which added to the ambience.

The Woodcutter is the guardian of the Wood. He is a powerful man who doesn't seem to covet power - he does what he must. An evil queen is trying to take over the twelve kingdoms and he is the only person who can stop her.

From Snow White to show more Baba Yaga to Odin, the tale covers many legends and fairy stories of yore. The main characters are fleshed out, the Woodcutters wife waiting at home the only thing keeping him going at times. It blends them to a perfect mix which I thoroughly enjoyed.

This kind of book is the reason I created the book group in the first place! I'm now looking forward to the next book... show less

What an amazing project it was to tie together so many varied and differing fairy tales into one consecutive tale that even has a logical flow to it. While not quite my style, I can still appreciate the beauty of the work.

I'm giving this, I think perhaps generously, 3***.

One of the problems with tales of magic is that the magic can sometimes be used to excess -- to the extent that cause-and-effect becomes minimally necessary to the author with the result that plot can simply jump from one episode to another with little actual basis in causality. Combine this with fairy tales -- in which characters are largely archetypal -- and we have characters whose archetypicality makes them of little interest to us.

That's probably a good reason why so many fairy tales are short stories rather than full-length novels. In a short story, the magical weakening of cause-and-effect and the use of archetypal characters need not be a flaw because the magic and show more archetypicality combine to create a mythical, legendary effect -- an effect, though, which does not carry over throughout a longer piece of prose fiction.

Combining these flaws with a quest novel, in which causality can be so important, only aggravates the problem, and that seem to be the problem here. The only character of any real interest is The Woodcutter himself, and his oft-times magical invulnerability only fails in the conclusion of the novel, where he does at last acquire some real interest -- sufficient interest, I might add, to make the deus ex machina conclusion a bit more acceptable.

Fairy-tale retellings can work. A good example is Michael Buckley's The Sisters Grimm series, but Buckley's success derives mainly from the very realistic relationship between the two sisters, Daphne and Sabrina. Here, too much is centered upon The Woodcutter alone, especially after his wife has largely passed out of the story and the boy Jack has also largely disappeared. Without supporting characters of interest, everything turns on The Woodcutter and his quest, and here the excessive use of magic destroys any real tension in the character development throughout the eponymous hero's quest. show less

It's interesting how opinions on this book are so polarized, but I guess I can understand why. It's a riff on the traditional fairy tales, and the writing style is a little abrupt at times, but it really tickled me in all the right places. You'll either love or hate this book. I loved it.

This was a fun and zippy weekend read, meant for people who enjoy fairy tales and fantasy. Following two wars between power seeking humanity and the fae, the fae set up 12 human kingdoms to be ruled by those with a mix of faery blood. As long as 6 kingdoms are ruled peaceably, the fae agree not to destroy humanity. Watching over this arrangement is the Woodcutter, who lives in the neutral Wood, naturally enough, and is one with the trees. Mixed blood humans/fae continually wander into his Wood, driven by the magic present in the kingdoms, living out fairy tales and legends. So the Woodcutter does things like follow little girls dressed in red capes on their way to grandma's house, and sometimes he is able to save them from the wolf, and show more sometimes he is not.

But when Cinderella is found dead in the Wood without a mark on her, the Woodcutter senses something more sinister afoot. One of Odin's hellhounds is loose and taking the souls of rightful heirs to the kingdoms who have been somehow delivered into the Wood. The Woodcutter must uncover the plot, fight the evil Queen whose madness for power risks delivering all humanity to destruction, and save the magical beings who live in the Wood and the kingdoms from becoming enslaved in the illicit faery dust trade.

Scads of familiar fairy tales are incorporated into the novel, which is itself a fairy tale, warning of the dark side of human motivations and the bad ends to be found by pursuing them, and the saving benefits of true love.

The internal logic of the story is occasionally difficult to suss out, but the story flies by and kept me turning the pages with pleasure. show less