Review
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Title: The Witch in the Woods (Grimmworld, #1)
Author: Michael Brent Collins
Illustrator: Brandon Dorman
Publisher: Shadow Mountain Publishing
Genre: Children’s fantasy
Year Published: 2024
Number of Pages: 307
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-63993-232-0
Price: $18.99
Reviewed by El Call for the Association of Mormon Letters
I’ve been an avid reader of retold fairy tales—The Sisters Grimm series was one of my favorites—and The Witch in the Woods is yet another entry in that genre. The siblings Grimm in the Grimmworld series are the 10-year-old twins Willow and Jake, who are uprooted from their comfortable lives in Los Angeles to move to Idaho for their parents’ jobs.
The oddities in their lives start as soon as their family leaves for the town of New Marburg, and it’s easy for a reader to feel just as confused as the twins are. Why does a strange man appear to attack them, and why can’t their parents hear them when Willow and Jake try to explain the attack? The story gets more unsettling when they get to their Wayside-Story-esque school where everything seems a little bit off. (I do have to say that I was grateful for the clarification regarding the windows because I definitely paused and wondered how a school without windows could ever be up to code.)
In general, reading this book feels like being shoved into the deep end of a pool. While that may make it easier to relate to Willow and Jake’s experience, I found it disorienting and hard to follow. The strange technologies of New Marburg and the fantastical elements of Grimmworld were overwhelming to reconcile. The amount of parenthetical explanatory notes in the first chapters made me rethink my own habits of using that many asides. Additionally, this book leans on the overused “multiverse” trope.
Still, I did enjoy the solutions to riddles that needed to be solved in order to escape a witch. I also think Willow and Jake model a good sibling relationship. The Witch in the Woods may be more fun for someone heading off to—or living in—the peculiar hell that is middle school.