Title: The Wolf and the Pear
Author: Alex Jane
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 95 Pages
Category: Fairy Tale
At a Glance: The Wolf and the Pear is an erotic fairy tale, dark in a different way than the traditional fable, but its happily ever after follows the formula faithfully to its ending.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Once upon a time, there was a boy named Lev. He didn’t have skin as white as snow or hair that fell in golden ropes. But he was quick-witted and braver than he knew.
And he would need to be.
When Lev goes to live with his uncle in the little village nestled against the deep dark forest at the foot of the mountains, the place seems pleasant enough. But Lev soon starts to wonder about things that don’t quite make sense—dark looks on people’s faces, cries in the night that go unanswered and secrets whispered. But it isn’t until the first full moon that he truly understands why his parents left their families and never wanted to return. Or why they never spoke of Grandmother who lives in the forest. Or the Big Bad Wolf who lives with her.
Until one day Lev is sent into the forest to Grandmother’s house. Then all he wonders is whether he’ll ever make it out of the forest again.
Review: Alex Jane’s The Wolf and the Pear is a dark fairy tale in the context of it being less Disney than it is Brothers Grimm. The fairy tale has always served as a lesson or a cautionary device—Cinderella isn’t just a story about a girl finding her Prince Charming; it’s also a word of warning about the extremes of avarice and jealousy. Her stepsisters went so far as mutilating their own feet to try to fool the prince and win him away from the glass slipper’s rightful owner, after all. In The Wolf and the Pear, the moral of the story might be as simple as “don’t let appearances fool you.”
The shadow and evil are presented in the atmosphere of the mysterious forest and in the witch/crone who is the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. The orphaned child is a staple of fairy tales as well, and Lev takes on that role. The loss of innocence and a stripping away of a sense of love and security opens him up to all manner of consequences. Lev being offered a talisman by his mother before her death becomes as significant as his being taken in by an uncle and aunt he’s never met. He’s stranded in the place his mother had fled years before, a place she’d never spoken of, which places Lev within arm’s reach of the village elder who appears harmless…on the surface. Deceit and manipulation have a power as great as magic, laced with a cruelty that left me wondering who’s more the monster, the beast or the humans, a question that is answered definitively as Lev becomes the unexpected hero the villagers—and the wolf—needed.
As a content warning, for those who might appreciate it, there are a couple of sex scenes that flirt with dubious consent. In this case, however, where the Big Bad Wolf is meant to represent a feral beast more than a tamed human much of the time, the tone of his behavior with Lev—at once brutal and brutish, while gentle and soft at others—is consistent with the anthropomorphism of the wolf, his taming, and is somewhat tempered by it not being portrayed as romantic as much as it is something that Lev doesn’t not consent to. If we’re being honest, Lev is turned on by a bit of rough. The temptation of the forbidden fruit plays a role in the story as well, drawing Lev and the wolf together and becoming a symbol of the wolf’s offering of himself to Lev.
The Wolf and the Pear is darker, in an erotic way, than the traditional fable, but its happily ever after follows the formula faithfully to its ending.
You can buy The Wolf and the Pear here:
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