Three interwoven stories.
The main plot deals with the folklorist Jacob Grimm, nearing the end of his life and in failing health. He is cared for by his niece, Auguste, and a servingman, Kummel. The relationships between all three are fraught with tension and secrets.
In flashback-style, we also learn about the young Jacob and his (rather unhealthy, interdependent) relationship with his younger brother, Willi.
Interspersed with these two segments is a retelling of the story of Sleeping Beauty, mixed with elements of other fairytales and some entirely new additions.

By an Oxford grad, the book is surely not without literary merit, but I wished that the story had focused less on Auguste's angst and more on the historical details of the Grimms' lives and work. I had hoped to come away from reading this book feeling that I knew much more about the brothers – but I didn't.
I liked the ‘fairytale' segment, but its function seemed, to me, to mostly be illustrative – to show an ‘unsanitized' version of an old story. The issues brought up thematically in that section, I felt, should have related back to the story going on in the other segments – but they really didn't.
I also couldn't help feeling that Middleton wasn't really inside the heads of his characters. A sense of time and place (Germany, 19th century) was established by throwing in stuff like gratuitous references to "schnitzels" rather than through the characters. And finally, I found Middleton's indirectly-implied thesis that German fairytales are somehow related to Nazism to be annoying and offensive (he makes a comment about how the German versions of fairytales were distinctly ‘nastier' than, say, the French versions – which I think is definitely arguable and probably untrue.) The author also uses Grimm's belief in folklore being an important part of our heritage to imply that the ‘nastiness' of the stories says something about the German people as a whole. The character of Kummel, who is entirely fictional, is included merely to give the author a chance to bring up anti-Semitism, and I found it totally irrelevant to bring up, in the afterword, that Hitler used versions of Grimm's book to promote the ‘German folk community.'
The Grimms were not anti-Semites, they died well before the rise of Nazism, and I don't believe that fairytales have any culpability for or connection to fascism in any form.
This theme is not by any means the largest part of the book, I think it's just something that I'm personally sensitive to."

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