This book brought some very conflicting emotions in me. While marketed as “The Nutcracker for adults”, it still read very much like a children’s book, and I mean that not as a bad thing, just that my expectations skewed my view of the book.
But let’s be honest: this was a cover read. I desperately wanted to buy it when I saw the hardcover in Waterstones because it was just SO beautiful, but ended up getting the audiobook from the library instead, which I think was a great idea. Also, I am a ballet dancer – I did ballet for over 20 years, so I think I got some some extra enjoyment from the descriptions of dance that the everyday reader might just not understand.
Let me tell you a little bit about the book. Marietta is a 20-year-old in 1906, daughter of an rich, important society family in Nottingham. Dancing Ballet is her life, and she wants to apply for the ballet company, but her father expects her to stop ballet altogether and get married.
She discovers that her father plans to marry her off to their new neighbour Drosselmeier, an old slightly creepy inventor who is building a magical set for the performance of Sleeping Beauty her ballet studio is putting on at her parents’ Christmas party.
On Christmas Eve, Drosselmeier corners Marietta while she is rehearsing on set, and she goes through a portal inside a clock and gets stuck in Everwood. A magical town where everything is made of sweets, where she ignores everything people tell her, makes a lot of stupid choices and brings all the conflict of the book onto herself by being prideful, self-obsessed and overall an idiot.
Sorry – it’s just that this is the one thing I had the biggest issue with: I couldn’t really connect to the story because I really thought she deserved everything that was happening to her, because she’s the only reason it’s happening at all. That and the side-characters were a little interchangeable. Most of the time I couldn’t tell her father (bad, authoritative tyrant) from her brother (good, in the closet gay painter brother), and that is just a bad sign.
On the plus side, the atmosphere of the book is wonderful and the writing in beautiful. It feels like you’re in that world, and if you’re me (who’s been on a keto diet going on 2 years), desperately hungry.
Overall, I enjoyed it. It was beautiful, it just felt a bit immature. So if you adjust your expectations, you might come to love this.
