La Mesa Library Has Summer Reading Recommendation: 'Lies, Knives and Girls in Red Dresses'

Looking for a new book to read? Librarian Technician Hae Jung Kwon from the La Mesa County Library has got a great recommendation for you.

What it's called: “Lies, Knives and Girls in Red Dresses”

Who wrote it: Ron Koertge

Read it if you liked: “The Real Boy”

What it's about: Winner of “Publishers Weekly” Best Book of 2012 and “Kansas City Star’s” Top Books of 2012, “Lies, Knives and Girls in Red Dresses” is a wonderfully chilling knock outside the door. It is a free-verse treatment of classic and obscure fairytales for the modern retelling, hand in hand with visually sharp and deeply lined woodcut art illustrations by Transylvania-born Andrea Deszo, who currently serves as art professor at Amherst College. Twenty three archetypes or tales reappear in an imagined space with varied voices and points of view, which opens up the conversation and inner landscape for the life-long reader.

The truth Koertge carries through all the voices and personas led me to read these fairytales as archetypes from the collected unconscious. These stories allow the reader to be predator and prey, light and darkness, lost and omniscient against a classic backdrop. I leave you with a quote from the book’s illustrator, Dezso, who shared: “We didn’t have access to contemporary publications (in Communist Romania), so we read the classics. We lived in books. Traveled through them.”

How to get your hands on it: Visit your local County library, request it in the library bookmobile or see if it's available online through e-books.

—County News Center