Customer Reviews

Millers' Tales: New World Fables, Book 1

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ah, Fairy Tales. Sweet children's stories? Avid readers know better. In true spirit of Fairy Tales, Jeffrey Berg has created a world familiar and fantastic. Set in NYC in the 1900s, the setting is naturally ripe for exhibiting struggle and darkness. Our heroes, George and Helen Miller, are both victim of circumstance and masters of their own fate. Their choices lead to salvation. Or is it destruction? Villians are around every corner, ready to harm. Or do they help? Are these events impossible to believe? Yes and No. This fast read will carry you, like a trail of crumbs, through the potential reality of family and relationships.

I could not put this book down! In Millers' Tales, Jeff Berg created a world so vivid and inviting that the writing draws you in and makes you feel like you're actually experiencing life along with George and Helen. I can't wait for the next book!

As a boy I listened to the stories my father told me at night, tucking me under the covers. These days I do the same with my chldren, making a little special connection. Fables are different than other stories. They're meant to entertain, but mostly to describe relationships between people and capture universal truths. To teach our kids a little bit about life and how they should wend their way through it.

What Berg has done here is deploy a few of our favorite plots in new context. Not the dark Bavarian forest of Brother's Grimm, but turn of the century New York. There's a bit of The Great Gatsby in there, posters constantly following our hero, vision replaced by pointing. We want more of our hero, even if he's a pig boy. This book is a fast read, but the prose is loaded with description and enlivened characters. The themes play out with details typically skipped in telling fabulous stories; we learn why Rumpelstilskin wants a child, what Gretel gives up when she pushes the witch into the oven and the real "magic" used to turn a boy be into a pig.

It's too bad there aren't more books like "Miller's Tales." Maguire's "Wicked" comes close, but Berg's characters are more real, and closer to home. The writing is also a bit tighter and less breezy. But the plots, and the universal truths explored are similar. For Berg it's the nature love and loveliness: "Beauty without kindness is like a flower without fragrance". And like "Wicked" you wouldn't want to read this to a six year old. This book is for adults and teens who enjoy a good novel, with strong plot, tight writing and a moral both Bush and Obama could get behind.

Recommended.

For anyone who has ever wondered about the dark nature of certain fairytales and fables, Jeffrey Berg gives us a poignant view of how the decisions of some very fairytale like characters impact on their lives and those of their children. Set in New York City at the turn of the century, the story of the nerdy, book-smart George and his beautiful sister Helen gives insight into how parents could leave their children to fend for themselves (a la Hansel & Gretel) and how such children could possibly learn to live with such abandonment. Mr. Berg shows us just how such abandonment influences the children and their decisions concerning love and marriage later in life in his three-act "modern" day fairytale based upon Hansel and Gretel and other classics. A fast and enjoyable read. I look forward to the second book of Mr. Berg's New World Fables.

Millers' Tales was a very enjoyable read. The story was compelling and fast moving and I quickly became attached to the characters. This is the story of George and Helen, two siblings living in turn of the century NYC with their immigrant parents. It is a re-telling of three classic fairy tales with the city as backdrop. George and Helen must survive in a city, where good and evil combine to both help and hinder them. The author builds a strong vision of what life in the city was like, and takes us through Manhattan and Coney Island, where George and Helen meet up with many "fabulous" characters. This is a perfect summer read, fast paced and well written, and once you are hooked, you can't put it down until the end. I look forward to the next book.

Miller's Tales was a great book that I could not put down from the moment I started reading it. I was always wanting to know what was going to happen next! Miller's Tales is a fairy tale brought into real life NY City at the turn of the century. The story takes you along with a brother and sister as they learn about true love, bravery and loyalty. This was a fast paced, wonderful read!!!

Millers' Tale is a fast paced book set in NYC at the turn of the 20th century. Berg's characters are well developed and the story has many interesting twists and turns. The two main characters, Helen and George, are faced with many challenges throughout their childhood and early adult life. How they cope and the decisions that they make create an interesting and exciting tale. I highly recommend this book and look forward to the sequel.

Taking one back to the turn of the century through the eyes of two main characters was a real treat. Becoming the main characters of Helen and George Miller depicted life in the turn of the century in an atypical sense exploring topics not always mentioned during that era. The effects of the depression, not only from an economical standpoint, but the effects in regards to social, mental, and physical health concerns. It allowed the reader to truly get a sense of a family's strife.

One of the charming parts of this book was that it also took you to fictional places an average family, particularly of of two siblings went through from their childhod and into their adult lives. It depicted the effects of one's life choices and how it carries them through.

It was truly good, quick read and as an educator, one I would recommend to use in the classroom at the secondary school level. Filled with descriptive detail and wonderful literary comparisons to Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstilskin, and Puss-in-Boots, this easily could lend itself into an excellent novel for literary education.

I look forward to the sequel....

It was said of Somerset Maugham that he controlled his plots with the flick of a wrist. That's true of Jeff Berg in Millers' Tales too. This story brings adventure and surprise. Yet it is also clear that the author put strict limits on the possibilities of the plot, meaning that he dug deep to get this story out. One of those limits is one that Maugham did not put on himself in the case his most winsome character, Larry Darrell in The Razor's Edge. Maugham flatly admits that he had to give Larry a trust fund in order to make his adventuresome and fascinating life just that. Yet here, for most of the book, the stricture is poverty when not destitution, with the characters brazening it out in lives that are emotionally and philosophically significant. That is a serious accomplishment on a novelist's part, so serious that some, such as Fitzgerald, concede they cannot even try to pull off. Naipaul is a big example in the other direction, and aside from scurrying back to him, this reader, on the heels of Millers' Tales, wants to sample something like Knut Hamsun's Hunger.