Matchless: A Christmas Story

As a Gregory Maguire fan I preordered this item and got it when it was released. I read it immediately and fell in love with the story. I hadn't heard the tale since I was a child and discovering it for myself again now was wonderful. While it may not be suited for all children, it's a beautifully written (and gorgeously illustrated) story of love, loss, and happiness. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys fairy tales.

I'll be honest, I get confused when people refer to Maguire's work as an "homage" to the original. He subverts, reinterprets and in some cases outright perverts the original stories into something new and different, sometimes with the clear intent of mocking the original - as an example, his most famous book, Wicked, can clearly be read as lampooning the idea that good and evil are dichotomous and one must be one or the other. With Matchless, Maguire puts away irony and subversion and creates a wonderful Christmas story that speaks to renewal, create beauty from tragedy, and in the process invokes a Dickensian England that is as visible as any the old father ever came up with and with far fewer words. Brevity can often be a curse in literature, as meaning gets lost in an edited text, but Maguire is able to speak volumes in his sparse prose, creating a book that can be read in very little time whose impact will last long afterwards. I love this book. I highly recommend it as a stocking stuffer for your more literate family members and I think that this will be one of those books I always pull out and enjoy during the holiday season.

Gregory Maguire's choice of words weaves a beautiful tale in this short story. I think his addition to Hans Christian Anderson's classic tale, The Little Match Girl, only enhances the story and creates a more likeable tale. The illustrations add charm to this hardback book which is perfect for gift giving. As a side note, don't be fooled by the book being 112 pages long. It is a very short story with sometimes just one phrase per page.

Gregory Maguire has firmly established himself as a masterful and eloquent storyteller with his takes on the Oz tales, Cinderella,and other staples of imagination. He brings all his word wizardry to bear on this poignant tale from the lovely and tender oeurve of Hans Christian Andersen. While the difficulty of rendering Andersen's pathetic and heart-breaking little match girl more so, Maguire succeeds well and ties in his own spin with the cleverly entwined tale of Frederik, who knows a bit about pathos and heartache himself. This is virtuoso writing that sings with poetry, passion, and perception. Readers of Maguire's earlier works won't want to miss this small Christmas treasure and it is a great holiday reading experience for anyone who loves great fairy tales or for those who simply appreciate great writing. A sugarplum with nary a fairy in sight.

Maguire is the type of author whom people seem to either love or hate. There's not so much middle ground and this book will likely evoke reactions similar to those of his more substantial books. Make no mistake however, this is not one of Maguire's typical books. What Maguire does better than most authors is to take an archetype of folklore and then to weave a tapestry around it that pulls it into modern times and make it more understandable and real to readers. Reading a Maguire tale may serve better in some ways to show the tale to better advantage than the original tale where many nuances and temporal elements are lost over the years. Many of those elements are true to form in this shorter tale but added to it as well are the line drawings of the author that reinforce the verbal themes with pictures that do more than just illustrate the scenes being depicted. Here Maguire uses his drawings to futher elicit and evoke feeling and emotion. A reader would do well to pause and linger just a moment more to see what Maguire is doing with these illustrations. Matchless, as a Christmas Story (the original was set on New Year's Day) with the additional tale woven in pulls out some of the story in a way that probably brings the reader into it to understand better what a contemporary reader of that day, age and place would have seen and felt. The typical western reader doesn't live with infant mortality, young children forced to the street to eke out a living and certainly not a young girl freezing on the streets with the hallucinations of a slow death recounted. This is not something that would draw memories and emotions from most readers. Maguire however provides those elements with his corallary tale in a manner that puts the original into a meaningful and understandable context that many readers otherwise would not likely have. A small and oft forgotten tale amidst other classics like the Ugly Duckling, in the works of Hans Christian Anderson, The Little Match Girl is perhaps seen as filler. It lacks the imagination and romanticism that have held those stories in our common cultural parlance. It is nevertheless a spark, when woven in the kindling of Maguire's elaboration that catches fire and brings a sense of mortality, family and the distant but all too close presence and remembrance of lost loved ones, that our culture seems to have run from and diminished. We bury ourselves in activity in an effort to drive such remembrance and awareness of suffering away from us. Not so in Maguire elaboration. The reader is brought to those reminders and remembrances that a contemporary reader would have known was there between the lines. Maguire gets it right to move this tale just a week earlier to Christmas and we're drawn into a tale that is at once familiar but still, given additional hooks to hang the feelings, pictures and emotions that Maguire paints upon on the canvass of a reader's mind. Many may walk away and miss what lies within thi