So, you're a devoted Sisters Grimm fan who's just found out about this book and is wondering whether or not you should care. Let's start things off with a little Q&A section:
Question: Should I read it?
Answer: YES.
Question: Should I spend money on it?
Answer: You should spend 25 cents on it.
Question: Should I expect great things from it?
Answer: No.
A Very Grimm Guide is a cute little book, about half as thick as the main SG books, except for The Inside Story which was positively anorexic. The pages are pretty and glossy, and in my opinion extremely well-designed. I love love love the various "items" from Ferryport Landing in it. Michael Buckley certainly got very creative with everything, and half the time I couldn't stop laughing for the geniusness of the various ads and papers. I think my absolute favorite would be Bluebeard's online dating profile, packed with more shades of pink than I've ever seen outside of a six-year-old girl's closet. (Sadly, the web adress is edited out. Ladies, we'll just have to hope we run into him in real life.) Second to that in awesometasticness is the flyer for Snow White's Bad Apples class. Really, every single one of these "authentic" things was packed with amazing jokes that only an SG reader would ever get. Next time I go to Ferryport Landing, I'll stop in at Old King Cole's just to get that edible bowl free with the kid's meal (edible taste not guaranteed).
But I know that's not what you guys care about. Let's face it, the one and only reason we're even a little bit interested in this book is because of Puck's endlessly helpful annotations (and because he's personally rubbed his behind on every single page, but let's try not to faint with pleasure). The one thing I can say against these things is that the handwriting is suspiciously neat for Puck's. (I guess he must have faked that book allergy, or maybe he just has a lot of writing practice from all those love poems he composes in Sabrina's honor.) These "edits" had me constantly bent over laughing from the extreme Puckishness of them all that no SG fan could ever come close to copying. There's an astonishing amount of fart jokes, even for Puck, but the ones I was laughing at were the ones meant to convince us that he isn't totally in love with Sabrina. It doesn't help that the picture for his profile is of their famous first kiss. He just goes on and on berating the poor girl as if it weren't perfectly obvious how much he likes her. My personal favorite note of his is that "The kitty just saw Sabrina's face and is screaming in TERROR." Actually, Puss in Boots is probably screaming because of that creepy naked man in the background--but this paragraph is getting too long already.
I love The Sisters Grimm, but my absolute 100% favorite parts of the Grimm Guide were the ones that didn't even have to do with the series. Throughout the book are little boxes labeled "Fractured Fairytales." These mini chunks of info talk about the original fairy tales, in all their bloody gory glory. As a huge fan of fairy tales, and a huge hater of the Disney-sweet adaptations of them, I absolutely loved these. Another thing I appreciated were the bios of real-life fairy tale writers mixed in with those of the SG characters. Puck writes all over the pictures of Hans Christian Anderson, the Brothers Grimm, and others, but their biographies are complete and untouched. And as a final piece of amazingness, all the Everafters' bio pages have pictures of them both by Peter Ferguson and from original illustrations of them. Puck's is particularly cute, showing two sweet smiling fairies and the handwritten note: "This isn't me."
But as I already wrote, do not expect great things from this book. After all that gushing about its amazingness, I need to disillusion you. It's fun to look at, and fun to read, but fun things are rarely ever great things, and do not get your hopes up. First of all, while it's definitely written in a great way, there is practically no new information in this book except for the ads I've already mentioned and a couple of hints at Book 9. I put off reading the character bios for last, because I already new everything in them. And even those were sadly incomplete and inconsistent. Buckley wrote pages about insignificant, obscure characters (I mean, who cares about Buzzflower and Mallowbarb?) but not a single word on a few bigger ones; for example, Moth. Moth was the one character whose biography I was looking forward to reading, since she's my favorite villian after Red, but the only mention of her was her name in the New Hope manifest at the beginning of the Guide. That. Was. IT. For all his hints at Puckabrina throughout the book, Buckley fails miserably at introducing the kind of romantic tension Puck fangirls slobber over. And besides that, Moth is just too freaking amazing of a character to forget the way he does. She isn't the only one he forgot about, just the one I care about most; the truth is, Buckley skips over a lot of stuff that could really make the Grimm Guide ten million times more amazing.
So, should you really read it? Like I said before, yes, read it. It's been such a long time since the 8th book that, unless you want to do a high-speed SG reading marathon like I am now, you need the memory refresher. Should you buy it? My "25 cents" remark earlier was a bit exaggerated, though personally I rarely pay over a dollar for a book myself. It depends on what you want. If you already have the whole SG series, then I recommend buying it just to complete the set. If you find it for a really good low price, then buy it. But if you just want to read it, do what I did and get it from a library.
Should you expect great things? No, but you'd better expect a laugh.
