Why was this in the pile? Look at that cover! How could you not buy it? The cover initially drew my eye when I first saw it in the book shop and I bought it for my wife. It was more her sort of thing than mine. For one reason or another (mostly that we have so many books!) neither of us ever got around to reading it, until now.
On the surface of it The Woodcutter sounds like another fairy tale themed YA romance. The actual book is very different. There is a romance, but it's not YA. There are also fairy tales, but it's not one fairy tale, it's loads of them. There is pretty much every European fairy tale you could think of, and even a few you may not know, shoe horned into the pages of The Woodcutter.
It's a quick and easy read, but also quite fun. It's not really humourous as such, in fact the title character is rather humourless, but the fun comes from the spin that Kate Danley has put on the well known tales and seeing how she'll weave them into her narrative.
I was pleasantly surprised by this. It made me think of Garth Nix's Frogkisser! which I adored, but whereas Frogkisser! riffed on fairy tale tropes, it was an original story with original characters. This has those same tropes, but because they're being enacted by the characters they were originally written for, no new characters.
I also kind of like the idea that there's a world out there where all the fairy tale characters live together. That's one of the things I like about Amy Mebberson's webcomic Pocket Princesses. I liked the idea so much that I've even used it in two books of my unpublished Realmspace series. Admittedly Realmspace may never be published, but I keep writing them because they're so much fun.
It's that rare beast in fantasy these days, in that it is a standalone story. Admittedly I'm uncovering more of those with this reading project (3 out of the 4 books I've read have been standalone). I could see it making a pretty good film and it's one of those unknown little gems.
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