Many reviews were negative as far as listening to this tale, which did not stop me from purchaseing. I read other reviews before I purchased this book. Wonderful story of Wilhem Grimm and Dortchen The last seven or eight chapters of the book finally pick up in a way that you are engaged and rooting for the main characters but I think we could've gotten to this point long before then and still been satisfied overall. Perhaps this would've been a different experience if I had actually read the book versus tried to listen to it but that would be to blame the narrator and that seems unfair as I believe she did the best she could with the material she was given. This is the first time that has ever happened to me since I learned to read at the age of five. Much of the book was depressing and I had to leave it alone for weeks at a time and gear myself up to go back and try to finish it.

Additionally, the character of the family father was rather disturbing and I think emphasized perhaps a bit too much at times. Nothing ever got better, nothing ever changed, and things only got worse- and I suppose I simply reached my tolerance for this long before I was given a reprieve. Who doesn't know of the Grimm brothers and their work but it dragged on for hours with what I consider to be an extraordinary amount of filler. I so wanted to like this book especially once I had read the description, as it seemed like such an interesting topic and a novel and new approach to explore something so many of us not only grew up with but have since learned the true stories of.

Yet Dortchen is determined to find a way.Įvocative and richly detailed, Kate Forsyth's The Wild Girl masterfully captures one young woman's enduring faith in love and the power of storytelling. But Dortchen's father will not give his consent for them to marry, and war, death, and poverty also conspire to keep the lovers apart. Forced to live under oppressive French rule, Wilhelm and his brothers quietly rebel by preserving old, half-forgotten tales that had once been told by firesides of houses grand and small all over the land.Īs Dortchen tells Wilhelm some of the most powerful and compelling stories in what will one day become his and Jacob's famous fairy-tale collection, their love blossoms.

Napoleon Bonaparte wants to conquer all of Europe, and Hesse-Cassel is one of the first kingdoms to fall. She finds herself irresistibly drawn to the boy next door, the handsome but very poor fairy-tale scholar Wilhelm Grimm. One of six sisters, Dortchen Wild lives in the small German kingdom of Hesse-Cassel in the early 19th century.

The Wild Girl by Kate Forsyth