You’re going to have to excuse me if I geek out a bit about how this book was constructed.  It delivers wonderfully on its promise–The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin–and lives up to the blurb on the back of a lighthearted and amusing tale, inventive and delightful.  But it goes much further than that!

The book is all about the poor boy who’s name is Rump, and since a person’s destiny is decided by their name, you can imagine how lovely his prospects look.  But as anyone can guess, that’s only the beginning of his name and the known part of it.  True to the original story, the rest will be discovered after much woe and heartache involving a gold-greedy king, and a peasant girl and some-day queen with a room full of straw and a willingness to promise away her firstborn child.   But, that’s the truly clever part.  Instead of re-shaping the old tale or taking it as a starting point and jumping off into a new story, Liesl scooped out and filled in all the missing parts of the orignial, making it a story that is truly unforgettable!

In her hands, Rump is not a greedy little gremlin that wants to destroy a family while he cackles over his tricky name.  He’s an adventurous boy-hero who must learn how to navigate the foolish choices of the people around him and untangle the web that’s tightening around them all.  Interwoven throughout in true fractured fairy tale style are references to other tales–his best friend, Red, who must regularly traverse the dark and dangerous wood on her way to Grandma’s house being my personal favorite.  I won’t say more, but the book was exceptional on every front and I highly recomend it!

Let’s see what Apricot-kitty has to say:

“Once again, a book without cats.  Clearly you people have not yet realized that a story without cats will never reach its full potential.  Still, this one wasn’t half bad.  I liked the pixies–the way they took charge behind the scenes and worked things out in the end was almost feline.  I also liked the donkey, Nothing.  He was a worthy soul.  The rest was okay, though of course I would always choose a nice cozy bed of straw gleaming in the sunshine over cold hard gold, no matter what its shape.”

I guess I forgot to mention the pixies–and they were super clever in a zombie-hungry-for-gold kind of way.  And the name ‘Nothing’ for the donkey highlights the fun with names throughout the book.  Liesl talks about the challenges of growing up with a unique name like hers in the back of the book, which made me smile.  I had the opposite problem, a name I considered the height of boredom and so lame no one would even use it–they always called me Susan.  What about your name?  Anything that could double as an epithet like Rump?  Have you made peace with your name as you grew, or did you love it from the start?

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