The Grimm Legacy

The Grimm Legacy is the first book in a young adult fantasy series by Polly Shulman. The book begins in present day New York City, with main character Elizabeth Rew. Elizabeth is obsessed with the Brothers Grimm, and when she lands a part-time job at the New York Circulating Material Repository, a library/museum that maintains a collection of historical objects, Elizabeth discovers magical items from the Grimm fairytales in the Repository's secret basement archive. Elizabeth also realizes that the some of the objects have been replaced by non-magical replicas, and she and her friends set out to discover the identity of the thief.

Elizabeth's own life is not unlike a fairy tale – her mother has died, and her father marries a woman who brings along two step-siblings, whom Elizabeth struggles to accept. Along with her mother's death and father's remarriage comes financial hardship, and Elizabeth is forced to attend a new, less expensive school and to get a part-time job in the afternoons. Elizabeth's history teacher recommends a job at the New York Circulating Material Repository, and Elizabeth is excited about the possibility of making new friends at work. After a strange interview, in which Elizabeth has to sort buttons, she is hired on as one of the library pages. She becomes even more excited when she learns that her crush, basketball champion Marc Merritt, is also working at there.

Things become more complicated when two other characters are thrown in the mix. Anjali Rao, a beautiful fellow co-worker, has captured Marc’s attention, so Elizabeth is forced to work with the less attractive Aaron Rosendoorn. Aaron is also in love with Anjali, and Elizabeth quickly becomes exasperated with all her coworkers and their complicated romantic feelings.



Soon after she begins working at the Repository, Elizabeth learns about a collection that only the most trustworthy employees can access. Inside the library is an archive called the Grimm Collection, which is rumored to contain the actual magical objects that are featured in the Grimm fairytales. Elizabeth, completely obsessed with fairytales, becomes incredibly excited about the possibility of seeing the objects, and she and her coworkers find their way to the special collections room where Elizabeth uses her extrasensory perception to sniff out objects that are not magical at all, but have been replaced with useless replicas.

Around the same time, strange things start happening at the library. With the objects missing, librarians, patrons, and even the four teenagers are suspected of being thieves. In order to clear their names and uncover the real objects, Elizabeth, Marc, Aaron, and Anjali set out on a quest to solve the mystery. In the meantime, Elizabeth discovers that her own coworkers have sometimes borrowed the objects for personal use– Marc, for example, admits to having borrowed the Seven League Boots to get his younger brother Andre home from daycare on time.

The kids soon discover the villain and a female accomplice who captures Anjali and uses a magic wand to transform her into a marionette. Everything becomes particularly wacky when the stolen magical objects are thrown into the fight, and the kids use golden keys, shrinking rays, and magical flying fans to defeat the thieves and return the stolen items to their rightful homes.



As the book progresses and the mystery unravels, Marc's younger brother Andre and Anjali's younger sister Jaya are thrown into the madness and become pivotal characters in the book. At the end of the novel, Elizabeth and Andre are the ones who find themselves trapped in the land of Nowhere and must find their way out.

The love quadrangle, though not necessarily a focal point of the novel, is resolved in the end, and the four teenagers even try their hand at some magical romance when Elizabeth is swept away by her boyfriend on a magic carpet.

Polly Schulman is the author of four novels for young adults, and many articles on subjects ranging from science to literature to complex math. She has worked for a number of magazines, including Science, Discover, and The New York Times Book Review. The Grimm Legacy won a number of honors when it was published in 2010, including an ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults listing, a Western Australian Young Readers Book Award, and a listing in School Library Journal's Best Books 2010. Schulman wrote two companion novels to The Grimm Legacy; the first is The Well's Bequest, published in 2013 and featuring objects from HG Wells science-fiction, and the second is The Poe Estate, which involves frightening objects from the world of Edgar Allen Poe. Her first book, Enthusiasm, is a quirky book in which 21st century girls try to use love lessons from Jane Austen novels to solve their own romantic problems, which doesn't go as well as they'd planned.