Eliza Granville's debut novel, Gretel and the Dark, is a grim, spooky fairy tale, but it boasts another layer: it is also a meditation on historical good and evil, set both in Nazi Germany and fin-de-siècle Austria.
In 1899, a shockingly beautiful young woman is rescued off the street and delivered to the home of celebrated Viennese psychoanalyst Josef Breuer. She is emaciated, beaten, shorn, with numbers inked on her arm; she claims to have no identity, so the besotted Josef calls her Lilie. Her story seems impossible: she claims to be a machine, sent to kill a monster, whom she must find before he grows too large. She frightens Josef with her dreamy plans, but casts an irresistible spell, and he is driven to puzzle out the truth of her history and the abuses she has experienced.
In the parallel plot, set several decades later, a little girl named Krysta pouts as the world around her changes. Her father works in a "zoo" during the days and can't stop washing his hands at night; she retreats into her imagination to avoid what she can't understand. As her personal situation deteriorates and her circle of trusted acquaintances shrinks, Krysta hopes to save herself using the fairy tales on which she was raised--even, or especially, the nasty ones, with wolves, witches, beheadings and gore.
Gretel and the Dark is a lyrical masterpiece of fantasy, horror, childhood innocence and the evils of both our innermost imaginings and our shared history. The chilling, fantastical tale will simultaneously entertain and provoke serious contemplation on the depths of human depravity. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia