This novel seems to transcend time. It's never really mentioned when it's set, and though the myths and stories Papa tells his grandson during the course of the book all connote to real-life events, it's difficult to figure out just when this is happening.

As the love child of Grimms' fairytales and 'The Road', 'Gingerbread' follows a young boy whose mother has just passed away from cancer, leaving him in the care of his grandfather, or Papa. They decide to take his mother's ashes to the woods outside of their home in Belarus, where they become enveloped by the trees and discover the difficulty of leaving the forest once it has become a part of them.

I genuinely believed that this would be a more fairytale, slightly magical type of story, but what I got was something a lot darker. This is not the kind of fairytale you want to fall asleep too; it's one that seems to move between fairytale and horror story. Especially being told through the perspective of the young boy, it makes a lot of the narrative appear so much more sinister than perhaps was intended.

However, I did really enjoy the magical realism of it. Dinsdale's descriptions of the forest and the forest becoming part of the two characters' psyche. If anything, the forest became the third character during those long stretches of prose where there was no other interaction with society. It was definitely an interesting novel, but not something I'd come back to.