Book Title: The One Hundred Nights of Hero
Author: Isabel Greenberg
Date Started: September 18th 2025
Date Completed: September 19th 2025
Genres: Adventure, Fantasy, Romance
Quality Rating: Five Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Five Star
Final Rating: Five Stars
Review:
◆ Thank you NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆
Since reading this graphic novel for the first time in 2017, it has been amongst my favourite books of all time, forever. At a time when I was finding my voice as a storyteller and recognising the patterns and power hierarchies and magic in the world, it was entirely pivotal to my worldview and my own sense of justice and worth. For the longest time, I was adamant that I wanted to adapt it when I became a filmmaker.
You can understand my heartbreak, then, when it was announced that an adaptation was in fact being made, directed by Julia Jackson, starring Emma Corin, Maika Monroe, Nicholas Galitzine and more. That heartbreak didn't last very long though, because it was being made, and well by the looks of things. Having secured tickets to the BFI London Film Festival Closing Gala of the film thanks to a friend, and preparing for the premiere of my second short film, itself inspired by myth, I knew I needed to reread it. I was not disappointed.
The One Hundred Nights of Hero is a story about storytellers, about courage in the face of fascism, and about the preciousness of words and the agency to use them for good. You never know what world a book or film or any other form of art will be released into; these days, by the time people see the final thing, it's been a long time since it was created. But some works of art ring true - sometimes even more so - when they're released. It's what makes them wild, and why the audience are part of their creation.
The point of fairy tales is sometimes oversimplified or sometimes objectively miscategorised as stories teaching people moral tales. If you'd like to avoid a little academic context, skip these two paragraphs, because I wrote my dissertation on this stuff and I'll be damned if I'm not using it. Moral tales, generally, actually align with animal tales or fables - two of the six types of traditional oral storytelling genres. Mythology and legends, intrinsically tied to religion, explore concepts of right and wrong in their respective cultures.
But fairy tales and folklore (generally speaking) were special because they weren't made to instruct, but to cope. We largely believe fairy tales and folklore to have been created by the people, for the people, in times of upheaval and persecution, prejudice and against the unfathomable natural world. They weren't stories that told you what to do if you ever found yourself in a certain situation; they were stories that said, if this ever befalls you, you have survived and this is how you get up again. They are, at their core, about making knowledge and courage accessible to all. This is why the characters in fairy tales and folklore are largely unnamed and predominantly without identifying features in the way that legends and myths distinguish mortals and deities, and how animal tales and fables paint certain character traits as animalistic stereotypes.
So, then, this fairy tale of epic proportions, inspired by timeless classics like A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the Twelve Dancing Princesses, is about storytellers telling stories in the face of fear and oppression. Okay, sure, simple enough, we've seen it all before, right? The market is undeniably now richer with narratives inspired by these ancient traditions, but in the eight years since I first read this book, I still haven't experienced something that came close to its gentleness, its defiance and its acknowledgement of pain that comes along with it all. Hero and Cherry, and their characters and ancestors, and even the men around them (good boys, just like Paris Paloma says) all suffer from the society and traditions they have been locked within, and pushing against it draws blood. It's scary. But the stories patch them together again. They teach us to get up again.
