The Toymaker's Apprentice
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- €5.99
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
A gorgeously imagined Nutcracker retelling from award-winning author making her middle-grade debut
Stefan Drosselmeyer is a reluctant apprentice to his toymaker father until the day his world is turned upside down. His father is kidnapped and Stefan is enlisted by his mysterious cousin, Christian Drosselmeyer, to find a mythical nut to save a princess who has been turned into a wooden doll. Embarking on a wild adventure through Germany, Stefan must save Boldavia’s princess and his own father from the fanatical Mouse Queen and her seven-headed Mouse Prince, both of whom have sworn to destroy the Drosselmeyer family.
Based on the original inspiration for the Nutcracker ballet, Sherri L. Smith brings the Nutcracker Prince to life in this fascinating journey into a world of toymaking, magical curses, clockmaking guilds, talking mice and erudite squirrels.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stefan Drosselmeyer's mother has just died at the start of Smith's (Orleans) fantasy riff on Hoffmann's "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King." Stefan, apprenticed to his toy maker father, wants to ease his grief by spending his journeyman years somewhere other than his home of Napoleonic-era Nuremberg. Luckily, his father's cousin, Christian, takes him on. Christian is clock maker to the King of Boldavia, and a royal appointment promises Stefan the best working materials and the heights of prestige. However, Christian came to Nuremberg on a quest that has driven him for seven long years and made him the enemy of every rat and mouse in the world, especially the Queen of Mice, who is attempting to make her people into an army. Smith's usage of elements from Hoffmann, Dumas's later adaptation, and the perennially popular Nutcracker ballet is extremely clever, though the dreamlike fantasy realms of Hoffmann and the solidity of Smith's Nuremberg mesh less well. Stefan is a personable protagonist, but while his story inescapably recalls the terrors and wonders of the original, it doesn't quite succeed in recreating them. Ages 10 up.
