“The Nutcracker” is a well-known and well-loved longtime Homer holiday tradition, including both the annual ballet and the craft fair that coincides with the ballet’s opening weekend. While the production team often adds twists and surprises to “The Nutcracker” every year, the story generally hits the same recognizable beats for the audience to follow.
Erika Johansen’s “The Kingdom of Sweets” is not that story.
Marketed as “a novel of ‘The Nutcracker,’” readers will find familiar elements and characters within its pages, providing a sort of comfortable road map for this “transportive reimagining.” But the tale that unfolds in “The Kingdom of Sweets” follows a darker path to its emotionally fulfilling end.
The novel tells the story of Natasha and Clara Stahlbaum, identical twins born on Christmas who come under the evil eye of their godfather Drosselmeyer. At their christening, they are forever marked when Drosselmeyer casts a spell over them — “Light” for Clara, and “Dark” for Natasha.
The girls grow up accordingly — Clara is the bright belle invited to every social function and chased after by all the boys. Natasha is the dark twin, friendless and stuck on the fringe of society, always a wallflower as she believes she is supposed to be. But on Christmas Eve of the year the twins turn 17, Drosselmeyer appears with gifts, magical toys that walk and talk and dance — a clown, a ballerina, and a nutcracker. The magic takes hold that night, long after the party guests have all gone, and Clara and Natasha are transported to the Kingdom of Sweets ruled by the Sugar Plum Fairy, and Natasha is given the opportunity to change everything about her dark, miserable life.
Several elements beyond the plot intrigued me in “The Kingdom of Sweets.” While Johansen forges some new paths with her retelling of the Nutcracker story, she uses the theater production as a scaffolding to support her story, breaking the novel into sections labeled as “Overture,” “Act 1,” “Act II” — all the way through “Curtain.”
Johansen also hints at the subversion of the traditional story with each new section break by including excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land,” on the page.
“Only / There is a shadow under this red rock, / (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), … I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” the introduction for Act I: Christmas Eve reads.
It is a tenet carried throughout the narrative that nothing is ever exactly as it appears to be. As Natasha and Clara travel through the Kingdom of Sweets and undergo their own conflict, the very landscape changes before their eyes and the people they thought they understood are revealed to have depths never before seen.
Johansen emphasizes the “faerie” elements of the fairy tale in her novel. Drosselmeyer from the beginning reads like a mercurial fairy godparent and is extremely reminiscent of the wicked fairy godmother from “Sleeping Beauty” — an uninvited guest that nevertheless holds great power and should not be offended, who casts a spell on our protagonists that holds greater consequences yet to be revealed. The Sugar Plum Fairy — the Queen of the Kingdom of Sweets — is indelibly fae as well in ways that fans of other fantasy novels like Holly Black’s “The Cruel Prince” or Naomi Novik’s “Spinning Silver” might appreciate.
In all, “The Kingdom of Sweets” is a thrilling read, just outside the bounds of “holiday normal.”
Check it out at the Homer Public Library, currently part of their holiday display.
