Book Review: ‘The Sisters Grimm’ By Menna van Praag

Review by Lauryn Angel

I tore through the first half of Menna van Praag’s The Sisters Grimm. While the tagline of “bewitching fantasy with a dark edge evocative of V.E. Schwab and Neil Gaiman” didn’t exactly ring true for me, I did find it a compelling story with four varied and interesting female leads: Goldie, Scarlet, Liyana, and Bea. Each young woman is independent and hard-working; they aren’t aware of one another, but they have two very important connections: they share a father – Wilhelm Grimm — and a birthday. And little do they know it, but their lives are about to change on their eighteenth birthday – November 1. They have just over a month to find each other and figure out how to survive the hunters – young men like Leo, whose purpose is to kill the Sisters Grimm in order to prolong their own lives.

Somewhere about the middle of the book, however, the story lost its oomph for me. I think part of the issue I had with it is the multiple perspectives, with Goldie telling the story from first person point-of-view – even when the story had shifted to another character. Even with the header indicating whose perspective the section was from, the shift into “I” when Goldie wasn’t the focus was more than a little distracting. Added to this, while the story takes place over the course of a month, we only get snippets of each character on each day. This made it difficult to focus at that middle point, and I was tempted to put it down and move on to something else. However, I pushed through that lagging point, and once I hit page 300, the momentum picked up again, and I was glad to finish the book.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the book is Liyana’s tarot deck. I love the descriptions of these cards and would love to see them done by Abigail Larson, whose portraits of Goldie, Scarlet, Bea, and Liyana are featured in the book (and on both van Pragg and Larson’s Twitter accounts).

I enjoyed The Sisters Grimm, but I didn’t love it, due to that laggy bit in the middle. In spite of this, I enthusiastically recommend the novel to fans of modern fantasy in the vein of Gaiman. The book was not quite as dark as the blurb led me to expect, which is perhaps why I’m left with the feeling that something is missing. But I would certainly read more for Menna van Pragg without hesitation.