Reviews for The Witch's Guide to Cooking with Children

The average rating for The Witch's Guide to Cooking with Children based on 2 reviews is 1.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-29 00:00:00 Jon Sod So yes, I had originally signed out Keith McGowan's The Witch's Guide to Cooking with Children from Open Library because from the book title, I (and it turns out rather majorly wrongfully) believed that McGowan's text would be a humorous type of child-friendly cookbook (perhaps a tome where a witch is teaching children how to prepare creepy, crawly and strangely colourful, warped looking and tasting foods and decoctions). And yes, when I realised my mistake (namely that The Witch's Guide to Cooking with Children is in fact not a cookbook but rather a Brothers Grimm Hänsel und Gretel retelling), while I was definitely more than a trifle disappointed, I was still at first planning to read The Witch's Guide to Cooking with Children (because I was a bit intrigued by the premise and do sometimes rather enjoy fairy and folk tale regellings). However, after reading the beginning of The Witch's Guide to Cooking with Children and finding the first person, aggressively in my face narration of the Hänsel und Gretel witch not at all engaging, but at best uncomfortable and creepy (and with an attitude profoundly against children and constantly making excuses for why she, for why the witch has over the centuries been killing and consuming them, that her "prey" often has been donated to her clutches by supposedly stressed out parents and that the cooked and eaten children have therefore also generally deserved their collective fates), sorry, but I truly was soon seeing proverbially red and so much so that I decided to quit reading and to consider The Witch's Guide to Cooking with Children as yet another DNF novel (and while I do feel a bit guilty at not continuing, I really and truly cannot stomach how Keith McCowan has the witch present her point of view and since the ending of The Witch's Guide for Cooking with Children is also supposedly majorly abrupt and cliff hanging, I really do not think that I am missing anything much by deciding not to finish).

Review # 2 was written on 2016-10-18 00:00:00 Jason Brazier This is a revision of Hansel and Gretel, in a modern setting. A brother and sister fight off the witch who eats children. The witch no longer lives in a gingerbread house in the woods. Her woods have all be cut down and the city has grown up around it, so she now lives in an apartment building and accepts donations of from parents who are annoyed by their children. It's a cute idea, but the story is a little muddled by seemingly pointless additional characters and the writing is not terribly engaging, compared to other middle grade books I've read recently. The illustrations could be interesting, but the book copy I'm using is so poorly printed that the pictures are a dark mass of graytones. I can hardly complain, though. I picked this up in a thriftshop, mostly because the title caught my eye and I thought it might be amusing. I read this for the Witches square in the 2016 Halloween Bingo.