The nutcracker doll that mysterious Godfather Drosselmeyer gives to little Marie for Christmas is no ordinary toy.
–GoodReads
My Review
I am admittedly a Dumas slut so I may be a smidgen bias in my four cup rating but hear me out!
I’m also a huge fan of classic novels across a crap ton of time periods. Okay so I’m biased across the board. I am sorry lol.
The Nutcracker is one of my top fave ballets and I do love the original tale by E.T.A Hoffmann which I read a lot to the spawn when she was younger.
This was my first read through of Dumas’s take on the tale. I really enjoyed that he did it as a narrator telling a story within a story and it stayed true to the best parts of the original story (and had my fave bits of the ballet included for the most part).
It is drier than Dumas’s other works but because it’s a novella it’s not something that completely ruined the read for me but that’s why i8t wasn’t five full stars. And a good portion of this was also the backstory of Drosselmeyer and his nephew and how the play into the tale.
The story is just as magical as I always remembered and I loved being transported through all the wonders that The Nutcracker and Marie see.
Overall a fun read for those who love classics/fans of Dumas. Otherwise? I’d probably stick to Hoffmann and/or the ballet!
4/5 cups of coffee from me, I’m off to go watch the ballet again.
The Caffeinated Reader 