Matchless

Last year I wanted to read a book a week. I know bloggers who do this with ease, but I haven't finished a book for a very long time. Last night I started AND finished a book.

Fine. It had a lot of pictures.

And I might not be the intended demographic.

But it reignited the desire to read books.

The little book was Matchless by Gregory Maguire. It is a retelling of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen.

(Anderson is my maiden name. Hans Christian Andersen's family believed themselves to be descended from Danish Royalty and my family believed themselves to be descended from Hans Christian, who was never married, had no children he knew of, and may have been a little gay. I don't care, I still like believing we are bastard descendants.)

In The Little Match Girl, a little girl loses one shoe and a boy runs off with the other, she can't sell her matches, and ends up freezing to death on New Year's Eve. Like many of Andersen's tales, modern audiences get a nice white washed, happy ending version of my great grandfather's stories. (The Little Mermaid, The Red Shoes, etc.

Maguire is a writer after my own heart. Some people can come up with characters and plots, but he tends to take well know stories and twist them a bit to tell a slightly different story (Wicked, etc.). In this story, we meet the little boy who ran off with her shoe. It's not a long story, you should read and or listen to it.