Rare and Powerful Stories

Black Pearls: A Faerie Strand by Louise Hawes
Hardcover: 224 pages, from Houghton Mifflin


Book Review by Lonnie Busch

Lush, Buoyant, Terrifying, and Heartbreaking. What Hawes has accomplished with her new collection of stories, Black Pearls: A Faerie Strand, is nothing short of Brilliant! This is not just a retelling of the oldest and most cherished fairy tales you heard as a child, but a bold and breathtaking re-envisioning of such memorable stories as The Pied Piper, and Hansel and Gretel. Through Hawes’ powerful imagination and stunning prose, these stories have “grown up,” infused with a mature and wondrous new charm.

At first glance you won’t recognize the names of the stories in the Table of Contents; Hawes has chosen to rename her tales. But for those of you intimately familiar with these unforgettable classics, you will not be far into Hawes’ first story, “Dame Nigran’s Tower,” before you recognize the theme of Rapunzel. But what’s different is that Hawes has chosen to tell the story from the witch’s point of view, and not the horrible witch from the original tale who was so easy to hate and fear with her warts and pointy nose and bony hands, but a beautiful witch who risks her magical ability to fly, for a chance to experience the power of human love. These are compassionate, sophisticated stories that will hold you spellbound for hours, long after you’ve put the book down.

But be warned: not everyone in these stories lives happily ever after. Through the vehicle of these re-imagined tales, Hawes’ artfully exposes human nature in all its forms—at once raw and devastating, then beautiful and courageous—unwilling to take false paths for happier solutions. Hawes stays true to the story she’s fashioned, committed to the characters she’s shaped, faithfully following them through the dismal, dank forest if that’s where they lead. But even at their darkest, these stories manage to lift you up with their boundless energy and daring, their genius and empathy, their unwavering heart and soul.

Hawes is known for her virtuosic writing and her ease of transitioning between genres, producing YA Novels, Middle Grade Novels, Picture Books, and several short fiction collections. Her work has garnered awards from the Children's Book Council, the Young Adult Library Services Association, the Center for Children's Books, the New York Public Library, and the International Reading Association. It is due to her amazing command of language and literary genius that Hawes is able to imbue these mature stories with fairy tale magic. Through the enchantment of Hawes’ magnificent prose, I was transported back in time, not to my own childhood, but a realm where time has never existed, and yet, in terms of human spirit, not so different from today.