Stephen Carpenter (2)

I was intrigued by this, mainly because I love the show Grimm, and wanted to see how Stephen Carpenter originally conceived of the story before the Hollywood writers got their hands on it.

Well, I'm very glad the Hollywood writers did get their hands on it. The premise of the Grimm curse works much better as played out on TV than in this book.

Though maybe I'm unfair in comparing the book to the TV show. So let's take the show out of the equation. This book was really three novellas telling three different stories. It's a coming-of-age story of Jake Grimm, who discovered he was a foster care child and runs away to find his real family. At least I assume he was in foster care - the author kept saying he was "adopted" though why his adopted family would get checks from the CPS is beyond me.

The writing was a bit amateurish, and the plots, particularly for the first book, went by too fast and verged on info-dumping at times. The stories would have benefited greatly from more fleshing out and turning each section into a full novel.

However, I did really enjoy the world building, and the premise. And I really liked that last story, "Snow White." I wish Carpenter had spent more time talking about the "templates" that the Otherworld creatures and their victims tended to adhere to - instead, it was mentioned vaguely, and you read between the lines to realize that the templates were the old Grimm fairy tales. But why? And why was the current Grimm's birthplace where the Otherworld congregated - what happened when a Grimm died somewhere that wasn't the new Otherworld center, or what happened before there were Grimms?… (plus d'informations)