Goldie, Liyana, Scarlet, and Bea are sisters, even though they’ve never met. At least, not in the waking world.

When they were little girls, the quartet would meet in the strange, shadowy forest of Everwhere and they would do magic.

When they turned 13, however, they forgot. They forgot their father, Wilhelm Grimm. They forgot their powers. They forgot that on the day of their 18th birthday, they would have to make an impossible choice and fight a battle that, even if they won, they would lose. They forgot one another, all except for Bea, whose mother, though mentally ill and so often cruel, trained her daughter not necessarily to win the fight but most certainly to survive it.

Even if the others did remember, there’s so much in their daily lives to hold their attention. Goldie’s mother is dead, and she is trying desperately to raise her little brother even while she falls in unlikely love with the mysterious Leo. Liyana must decide between what she wants most and what is best for her family. And Scarlet is struggling to care for her grandmother, who is sinking further into dementia, and keep her grandmother’s beloved café open as a corporate monstrosity moves in down the street.

Can the Sisters Grimm survive their earthly battles? Their magical ones? The struggle to become their true selves?

Menna Van Praag has created an entire universe in the pages of The Sisters Grimm, one that utilizes every single one of the reader’s senses and engages their imaginations in one of the more immersive reading experiences I’ve ever had the opportunity to engage with. Because The Sisters Grimm is rather a weighty tome at ~470 pages, it does need rather a spectacular hook to keep readers engaged beyond action and characters, and the opportunity to live the story alongside the sisters is a marvelous one indeed.

Van Praag also has a gift for crafting characters. Not only does each have a distinctive voice, but each is intensely real in that they are multifaceted and conflicted. With the exception of the big bad, none of them is all light and all dark, even after they’ve made their decision to be one or the other.

The sisters are young and struggling; even when they believe they’re doing the right thing, they’re often viewing it through a lens focused back on themselves. They are heroines, but they are not paragons, which is a difficult balance for an author to strike since we humans do so like our unstained, unsullied saints.

We root for the sisters, though, not because they are better than us or even the best of us but because they are us, and if they can survive the worst night of their lives, then perhaps we too have a fighting chance. Shifts of tense and voice and POV pronoun don’t always work as the author intends, but in this case, the transitions were smooth and graceful and I never had any doubt as to who was speaking when. In fact, after a few chapters, the switching helped me determine who was speaking and whether we were in the past or present.

The Sisters Grimm was a bit of a risk for me as a reader; I love fairy tales, but I’m a bit particular about my retellings – not because I dislike the idea but because, while some authors pick the most intriguing bits to spin into a new story, others go straight for the darkest or most universal. A lot of people like those later options, and I’m so very glad they are able to find something that brings them joy. (The world would be a very boring place indeed if all authors wrote the same thing and it was all any of us wanted to read.)

I don’t know why I’m so choosy or why so many fairy tale retellings end up in my DNF pile, but The Sisters Grimm hit all of the right notes for me. There is enough of the original characters in Goldie, Liyana, Scarlet, and Bea that I can place them in their tales of origin, but there’s also enough that’s new and different to keep me engaged.

I like that they were given more agency than in the Grimms’ original tales, which, of course, is the whole point of their story and that Van Praag juggled the meta and fictional, bringing story and commentary together in a way that doesn’t scream and shout and wave its hands and play the trombone. I also enjoyed that this story is an amalgamation of stories, a single unifying voice – like the narrator of a book of fairy tales.

The Sisters Grimm really is a lovely book but one that is full of shadows and blood, one with darkness creeping in at the edges. One that reminds us all that beauty is fleeting and must be treasured, that not everything is as it seems, and that there is no power in the world stronger than the bond between sisters.

The Sisters Grimm by Menna van Praag drops March 31, 2020, from Harper Voyager.