Brave Red, Smart Frog

by Emily Jenkins

  Down the hill, they could see their father’s house. The chimney smoked merrily.

  “I am not sure I want to go back to that house again,” said Gretel. “Nobody there loves me enough to save me from the frozen forest.”

  “I love you enough,” said Hansel.

  “If you will be in the house with me,” said Gretel, “it will be home no matter what else is wrong there.”

  “I think Stepmother is dead,” said Hansel.

  “You do?”

  “Old Mother and Stepmother, too,” said Hansel. “I am mostly certain.”

  And, indeed, he was right.

  Hansel and Gretel’s father heard their steps on the yellow pebbles that lined the cottage path. He ran out of the house to embrace them, a face full of tears and a mouth full of regrets.

  He took them inside and made them dinner.

  They warmed their hands at the fire and drank hot milk.

  All evening, the three of them talked and ate and cried. Anger and shame, forgiveness and promises.

  It was not easy. But it was family.

  The little brick house with the smoking chimney was once again a home.

  My attempt here was not to be accurate to any previous versions of these tales. I am not retelling these stories to demonstrate the breadth or care of my research. At the same time, I am not reinventing the tales. Were I reinventing, I might have jacked up the stories with new contexts, antics, and details, the way movies like Tangled and Puss in Boots do. Or I might have rewritten them with feminist or satirical endings so as to critique the originals.

  What I’m doing instead is telling these stories largely faithfully, but without adhering to versions made famous by Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and others. I wrote them simply as I myself want to tell them, using the storytelling techniques I have at my disposal. After all, before people began writing them down, these tales were passed down orally. They changed a bit with each new teller. I wrote to bring out what’s most meaningful to me in the stories, and in that way I believe I am part of a tradition that goes back to the earliest tellers of these tales.

  As I wrote, I searched for answers to questions. Why would Red trust the wolf? How would it feel to have pearls dropping from your mouth? Why would an enchanted frog love a selfish princess, or a smart man marry a silly woman? Why is Hansel and Gretel’s cruel stepmother dead upon their return?

  I grew up with picture book fairy tales illustrated by Paul Galdone, Trina Schart Hyman, and the artists of the Walt Disney Company. Later I graduated to reading the famous collections by Andrew Lang and Howard Pyle, as well as Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. I still have my copies of the Lang and Pyle collections, their paperback bindings so worn that some of them are held together with rubber bands.

  In graduate school, where I wrote a dissertation on the illustrated novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I collected books of fairy tales illustrated by Walter Crane, Harry Clarke, Arthur Rackham, Kay Neilsen, and the like. These stories have followed me into adulthood, and I am now very glad to share my versions of them with you.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Emily Jenkins

  Illustrations copyright © 2017 by Rohan Daniel Eason

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First electronic edition 2017

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number pending

  Candlewick Press

  99 Dover Street

  Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

  visit us at www.candlewick.com