Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

by Gregory Maguire

Book Overview

The author of the beloved New York Times bestseller Wicked returns with an inventive novel inspired by a timeless holiday legend, intertwining the story of the famous Nutcracker with the life of the mysterious toy maker named Drosselmeier who carves him.

Hiddensee: An island of white sandy beaches, salt marshes, steep cliffs, and pine forests north of Berlin in the Baltic Sea, an island that is an enchanting bohemian retreat and home to a large artists' colony-- a wellspring of inspiration for the Romantic imagination . . .

Having brought his legions of devoted readers to Oz in Wicked and to Wonderland in After Alice, Maguire now takes us to the realms of the Brothers Grimm and E. T. A. Hoffmann-- the enchanted Black Forest of Bavaria and the salons of Munich. Hiddensee imagines the backstory of the Nutcracker, revealing how this entrancing creature came to be carved and how he guided an ailing girl named Klara through a dreamy paradise on a Christmas Eve. At the heart of Hoffmann's mysterious tale hovers Godfather Drosselmeier-- the ominous, canny, one-eyed toy maker made immortal by Petipa and Tchaikovsky's fairy tale ballet-- who presents the once and future Nutcracker to Klara, his goddaughter.

But Hiddensee is not just a retelling of a classic story. Maguire discovers in the flowering of German Romanticism ties to Hellenic mystery-cults-- a fascination with death and the afterlife-- and ponders a profound question: How can a person who is abused by life, shortchanged and challenged, nevertheless access secrets that benefit the disadvantaged and powerless? Ultimately, Hiddensee offers a message of hope. If the compromised Godfather Drosselmeier can bring an enchanted Nutcracker to a young girl in distress on a dark winter evening, perhaps everyone, however lonely or marginalized, has something precious to share.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0062684388
• ISBN13: 9780062684387
• Release Date: October 2017
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Strange and beautiful

Today's read: Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcraker by Gregory Maguire This novel is a retelling of The Nutcraker, but not the sugar-coated tale of pirouetting fairies, rather it is an homage to both the dark side of fairy tales and the bleakness of German Romanticism. Like his uber-successful Wicked, Maguire relates the story of a supporting character, in this case, Dirk Drosselmeier, the godfather who brings the heroic Nutcracker to the family. Drosselmeier wanders rather aimlessly & passively through a darkly fantastical life, unable to connect to others. He spends most of the tale adrift, a foundling abandoned in the woods by unknown parents, castout by his adopted parents, rejected even by death, searching for something he can't quite articulate or comprehend. Each person to whom he tries to fasten himself, eventually dies, leaving Drosselmeier wondering why it was he who got the second chance at life. Like the Nutcracker, his chest feels hollow, as though, having lost an eye to the enchanted forest, he's lost his heart as well. In his 2nd life Drosselmeier seems "severed from [his] true nature," his own past, and his memories, which seem more like dreams, unable to "grasp" "what divided... the things that could be seen versus the ones that could only be imagined." He becomes a conduit of the "old gods" that haunt him, gods that, through old stories, "steal secretly into our own times" gods "brought forward...to help." Yet this moment of purpose does not find him until he meets his goddaughter Klara toward the novel's end. "Without a memory, what does experience mean -- or matter?"