The Kingdom of Sweets
Erika Johansen, 2023
This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics, starting with this very different take on the Nutcracker.
Premise: A party. A magical toy from a mysterious man. A trip to a wondrous land of sweets. Plus betrayal, torture, and death. Not a story for kids.
So I have to admit that I was annoyed fairly early on in this book because it's a dark fantasy based on the Nutcracker, only it's about Clara's goth sister, and yet her name is NOT Marie. I mean, the idea of there being two girls was right there!
But no, the goth bluestocking sister is called Natasha. Natasha and Clara are twins, but Nat was supposedly cursed at their christening by Drosslemeyer, while Clara was blessed. Clara grew up beautiful and sweet, but a bit vapid, while Nat is spiky and awkward and reads books and learns the servants' names.
I was worried early on that the book would lean too hard in her being "better" because she's not "girly" like Clara. And it starts out looking that way, but actually nope. Nat's a villain. (Not THE villain, but definitely villainous.) And she learns way too late that she was being every bit as much of a stuck up dummy as her sister, just about different things.
If you need to like the main character to enjoy a book, skip this one. All the characters are broken in various ways, and most turn right around to start taking their pain out on anyone around them. There are no heroes here. (Nat does a few objectively good things, but she's only sorry for the horrible things she does after things don't turn out the way she wants.)
After a surprising amount of setup, the book kicks into gear with the Christmas party we're familiar with. I don't remember a Mouse King, oddly, but there are murderous living toys and a trip to another world. This trip is meant for Clara, but Nat ends up tagging along, which is why she can see the seams in the illusion and realizes that they are in a very dangerous place.
Which is what leads her to commit a huge and horrifying betrayal with all the conviction of any teenager making a very stupid and irrevocable choice.
The plot spools out from there, with fewer Nutcracker connections and more body horror, dark magic, and under-explained connections to Russian history. (By the end there was a definite sense that I was supposed to bring more preexisting history knowledge to this book and that would somehow make some things make sense? That came out of nowhere.) I liked some scenes a lot, but I didn't think the ending was really satisfying, and I thought the real villain could have been explored more. There were some tantalizing allusions to the Furies, but they never really went anywhere.
Cool atmosphere, cool visual ideas, but a bit flat in the final assessment.
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