Peter and Max Book

I've never read any of the Fables comics, but Willingham makes the universe very approachable to newbies. The novel is written so that even someone who has never read Fables comics can appreciate this book.

The plot in a nutshell: The characters from our fables and fairy tales have been living in our world for hundreds of years, though their communities are hidden through magic. They escaped from various different worlds to settle on Earth.

The novel is about Peter Piper and his older brother Max. As a child, Peter receives an inheritance that Max feels is rightly his. Because of this, the brothers become very different people. Max is bent on revenge, and Peter just wants to find his childhood sweetheart, Bo Peep.

The story is told with a heavy handed narration, very similar to the fairytale/fable-esque style of storytelling. This worked for the most part, but I did feel that it was a bit simplistic and lent itself to more than its fair share of "telling". Many descriptions were strained and lacked any visceral connection. And sometimes, they were just plain ridiculous.

It was interesting to see how Willingham made one-dimensional fairy tale characters into two-dimensional novel characters. Most of the other fable characters are merely devices and are mentioned in passing, like Snow White and the "cow that jumped over the moon." The only characters that receive any depth are the Piper boys, Peter and Max, and Little Bo Peep. It was interesting to see how these characters were shaped by adapting different methods of survival. However, I was still left feeling that I didn't know the characters as well as I could have. Throughout most of the book, the characters just do things, and we hardly know them well enough to understand why they took particular actions, entertaining as they may be.

I was also a little disappointed that there wasn't more of a focus on how music affected the boys. Their musicianship mainly surfaces when one of them needs something, becoming yet another device in a device-laden story. There is mentions of practicing their instruments, but when never get to see or feel how this relationship to music affects them.

I listened to the audiobook version, which I felt was really well produced. The narrator was one of the best I've ever heard, a natural storyteller. He captured the voices quite well, and made the entire production very dramatic and varied.

Ultimately I enjoyed this book because, flawed though it was, it was an entertaining story about sibling rivalry, survival, dedication, and dueling musicians. The ending, though a bit anti-climactic, fit well with the story.