Beware of the Wolves: Into the Woods by Lyn Gardner

Lyn Gardner's Into the Woods could have been subtitled "Folklore's Greatest Hits." This far-ranging romp through the characters and plots of European fairy tales--Rapunzel, Goldilocks, The Pied Piper, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and others too numerous to list, shares a serious theme with Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (50th Anniversary Edition) trilogy, the lust for a magical token which promises power over all.

Aurora, Storm, and Any (short for Anything) are the daughters of Zella (short for Rapunzel) and Reggie Eden, vague nobility of some sort, both indolent and devoted only to their overwhelming romance. Their shabby estate is maintained through the domestic dedication of Aurora, who is happiest when rearranging the linen closet, while second daughter Storm, wild and dissatisfied within the manor walls, longs to roam the woods and have adventures. When Zella dies after the birth of the third daughter, Reggie tells the older sisters to care for the baby, whom he thoughtlessly suggests they name "Anything," and leaves to work out his grief and study architectural sites. Before she dies, however, Zella rouses herself to give Storm a small pipe, which she hints has sacred powers and urges her to protect it with her life.

Soon Storm and Aurora realize that the return of the Pied Piper, in the form of Dr. DeWilde and his packs of wolves, threaten their home and their lives, whereupon they flee "into the woods," where their adventures really begin. Starving and half-frozen, they stumble onto a gingerbread house with a contingent of extremely well fed, if not well nourished, orphans who are being fattened by the Witch Bumble Bee on a steady diet of sweets. Storm realizes that the children are being drugged and when little Any is taken away with a wagonload of chubby peers, Aurora and Storm suspect that they children are to be eaten by Dr. DeWilde or his wolves and set out to find her.

It's a wild and woolly chase through forests, over glaciers and mountains, down into flooded mines where Storm swims through a drowned shaft to locate Any at last, who is a slave laborer along with the girls' great-grandmother, the supposed ogre Mother Collops, dredging up gemstones inside the Piper's mountain. There Storm bargains for her sisters' lives with the enchanted pipe as the lure. Dr. DeWilde seizes the pipe, but Storm must leave her sisters behind.

Storm is daunted but not defeated, and when DeWilde arranges an elaborate wedding with Aurora on her sixteenth birthday, Storm uses her skill at pyrotechnics to arrange a flamboyant fireworks demonstration leading to the denouement of the evil DeWilde and the return of the enchanted pipe to Storm, who, now cognizant of its corrupting power, tosses it into the sea in the satisfying finale to the adventure.

Readers who love stories of plucky princesses and other girl heroes and are fans of fractured fairy tales will find Into the Woods as funny and fascinating as Ella Enchanted (Trophy Newbery) and as wild an adventure as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (The Wolves Chronicles). Mini Grey's witty, incidental illustrations sprinkled through the text never show the characters, but Gardner's characterizations of the three very different but very loyal sisters need no graphic boost. This is a wonderful addition to the growing sub-genre of the fractured fairy tale.