PUBLISHER: Clarion Books, 1993PURCHASE: link
REISSUE: link
MY GRADE: B
FROM PUBLISHER: In 1697, Charles Perrault published a collection of eight stories. The stories, including The Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Puss-in-Boots, and Little Red Riding Hood, are among the best-loved nursery tales ever. Complete with morals at their conclusions, these dramatic and witty stories tell of princes and princesses, fairies and monsters, and ordinary people who use their luck and common sense to vanquish their foes and achieve happiness.
This complete edition of all eleven of Perrault's classic tales includes a new translation by Neil Philip and Nicoletta Simborowski that captures Perrault's sardonic tone and his sense of drama in modern English. An introduction and afterword provide biographical information on Perrault and set his tales in their folklore context. Beautiful and refind color illustrations by Sally Holmes gracefully draw the reader into Perrault's timeless and magical world.
Stories include: The Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss-in-Boots, The Fairies, Cinderella, Tufty Ricky, Hop o' My Thumb, Patient Griselda, Donkeyskin, The Foolish Wishes.
MY THOUGHTS/SPOILERS: These stories were first published in 1697. I didn't care for the story Tufty Ricky, named after his tuft of hair. A boy is born to a princess and is "ugly" and "malformed." At his birth a fairy said he'd be very clever and well-liked to make up for his unattractiveness. Many years later he meets a girl who is beautiful but "stupid" and persuaded her to marry him by telling her the fairy from his birth gave him the ability to make his future bride smart and he'd become handsome. Her sister too was "extremely ugly" but was smart to compensate for it.
I really disliked Patient Griselda, which is about a jealous and controlling man who thinks poorly of women. He wants to make his kind and gentle wife Griselda miserable because he's obviously sick in the head. He follows her around trying to aggravate her but it never does, which aggravates him more. He keeps her locked in a dark room. He lies and tells her their daughter died when in reality he's sent her away to a convent. Fifteen years later he tells her the daughter is alive and she marries. The story is just stupid.
I don't like The Foolish Wishes either. A poor married man is granted three wishes by Jupiter, Lord of the World. He makes three really dumb wishes and that's it.
The strangest one is called Donkeyskin. A girl's mother dies so her father falls in love with her and wants to marry her. Yes, her own father. She confides in her fairy godmother. The godmother tells her to make demands on him that he can't fulfill, like asking for extravagant gowns. He complies with all her demands. He's able to afford it because the donkey he owns poops out gold coins! She asks for the donkey's skin...and he gives it to her. She hides under the skin and escapes and finds a job as a house servant. The queen's son takes a liking to her and asks for her to bake him a cake. She does, her ring comes off in the batter and he almost eats it. And like in Charles's story Cinderella, he has all the women in town try on the ring to see who it fits and he'll marry her.
The most violent one is either Bluebeard, where a man has a room filled with the blood and corpses of his two previous wives and plans to decapitate his current wife for entering the room, or Hop O' My Thumb, a similar version of Hansel and Gretel, but with seven sons, not brother and sister. The family is poor and the parents lead all seven sons into the woods with plans to leave them there to fend for themselves. Hop, who's the size of a thumb, overhears their plan and leaves a pebble trail so they can find their way home, so they do. The parents do the same thing, lead them back into the woods and like before, Hop overhears them and this time leaves a trail of breadcrumbs so they can find their way back, but birds eat them. Now here's where it get really morbid- They come to a house and the wife there tells them that her husband's an ogre and will eat them but they have no choice but to stay with them. She puts them to bed with caps on their heads. In another room are their seven daughters, who have crowns on their heads. The ogre plans to slit the boys' throats the next morning, then eat them. Hop switches their caps for the girls' crowns to fool the ogre. He doesn't know who's in which room so he goes looking of the boys, finds them, slits their throats only to find out he really just murdered all seven daughters.
At the end of the book is one to three pages about each story's origin and similar versions that were around before and after Perrault's.
I enjoyed this, especially the color illustrations. There are about three or four pages per story that have illustrations and the stories are up to six pages long, with larger font. At the beginning and end of each chapter is a small images of something too.
I have an affinity for the macabre so I like the darker stories best, like Hop O' My Thumb, Bluebeard, and The Sleeping Beauty. After Beauty wakes up after a one hundred year curse, the prince puts his mother in charge of looking after her and their two children. The mother is jealous of Beauty and plans to eat her and her children then claim they got eaten by something in the woods. The queen was deceived and planned to make all three jump into a vat of snakes, vipers, and serpents while the prince was away but the prince arrives back home and finds out what she planned and she jumps into the vat herself. Puss-in-Boots is really cute. It's about a clever cat who helps out his owner. I prefer the Grimms version of Cinderella because of the punishment the stepsisters and stepmother get.
You can see my images from inside the book here. All illustrations were done for this edition by Sally Holmes. This book is back in print in hardcover with a similar cover on January 31, 2020.
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