Technically, this was my last read of 2020, but I was putting off writing the review. I fell in love with Wicked the musical, which led me to Wicked the book, which subsequently led me to Gregory Maguire. He takes fairly well known stories and reimagines them. Hiddensee is a “reimagined” version of The Nutcracker. Kind of.

The Story

Gregory Maguire returns with an inventive novel inspired by a timeless holiday legend, intertwining the story of the famous Nutcracker with the life of the mysterious toy maker named Drosselmeier who carves him.

Hiddensee: An island of white sandy beaches, salt marshes, steep cliffs, and pine forests north of Berlin in the Baltic Sea, an island that is an enchanting bohemian retreat and home to a large artists’ colony—a wellspring of inspiration for the Romantic imagination . . .

Having brought his legions of devoted readers to Oz in Wicked and to Wonderland in After Alice, Maguire now takes us to the realms of the Brothers Grimm and E. T. A. Hoffmann—the enchanted Black Forest of Bavaria and the salons of Munich. Hiddensee imagines the backstory of the Nutcracker, revealing how this entrancing creature came to be carved and how he guided an ailing girl named Klara through a dreamy paradise on a Christmas Eve. At the heart of Hoffmann’s mysterious tale hovers Godfather Drosselmeier—the ominous, canny, one-eyed toy maker made immortal by Petipa and Tchaikovsky’s fairy tale ballet—who presents the once and future Nutcracker to Klara, his goddaughter.

But Hiddensee is not just a retelling of a classic story. Maguire discovers in the flowering of German Romanticism ties to Hellenic mystery-cults—a fascination with death and the afterlife—and ponders a profound question: How can a person who is abused by life, shortchanged and challenged, nevertheless access secrets that benefit the disadvantaged and powerless? Ultimately, Hiddensee offers a message of hope. If the compromised Godfather Drosselmeier can bring an enchanted Nutcracker to a young girl in distress on a dark winter evening, perhaps everyone, however lonely or marginalized, has something precious to share.

My Thoughts on Hiddensee

When I had picked up Hiddensee at 2nd & Charles as an impulse, I so hoped that it would bring The Nutcracker to life. There’s so much potential there for a book! However, it is a tremendous stretch that this is “the backstory of the Nutcracker”. I danced that ballet for YEARS, so I know it very well. The Nutcracker in the novel is not even presented to Klara until the last 30 pages or so.

I will say that Drosselmeier carves the Nutcracker about halfway through the book, but it does not become a main feature of the storyline once carved. He tries to give it away to people in his life, and they all say no. It almost seems tainted at that point.

I also had a hard time “buying” the world building in Hiddensee. I’m not entirely certain of the timeline (though I would assume it’s the 1800s at some point). Dirk is able to travel the world and still runs into the same guy everywhere? Also, he didn’t start his toy business until later in life, but was able to travel with no money? I don’t know. It just seemed too unrealistic.

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