Elizabeth has always felt a special affinity for the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Following the death of her mother, her father married a woman with two daughters. While her Stepfamily isn’t exactly evil, Elizabeth feels like an outsider in her own home. Worse, the financial situation with her new family means she has to go to a new school and take on an after-school job. When her history teacher recommends her for a job at the New-York Circulating Material Repository, Elizabeth hopes this will be her chance to earn some cash and make new friends. The New-York Circulating Material Repository is a library for objects, where researchers come to look at tea sets and shoes. It even has items from historical figures, like a wig, once worn by Marie Antoinette. But the library’s most valuable items are locked in a vault that only the most trusted employees get to access. Rumor has it that the Grimm Collection contains the actual, magical objects from the Grimms’ tales. As strange things start happening around the library, Elizabeth …show more content…
Instead of being satisfied with a ride on a magic carpet, or a meal from a table that sets itself, the novel addresses the complexity of the fairy tales, the objects in them, and the way they are used. Shulman provides some interesting twists and turns to what easily could be a straightforward story of magical items running amok. The fascinating parts of the book are not the objects themselves, but the ways in which people use them. Seven-league boots become an addictive answer to the pressures of time in a busy adolescent’s life. The Magic Mirror provides more harm in its caustic answers than good in its ability to tell only the truth. And the prices with which the objects are borrowed --- one’s sense of direction or firstborn child --- are almost so terrible it seems a wonder that people would borrow them at