GENRE: Children's Fiction
ALL IMAGES: link
MY GRADE: A
SYNOPSIS: A Reader's Digest anthology, volume 1 of 2: The best of the world's fairy tales collected together from all over the world.
Featuring the stories: The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Snow White and Rose Red, It's Perfectly True!, Tom Thumb, The Nightingale, Chicken Little, The Frog Prince, Cinderella, The Princess and the Pea, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, The Golden Goose, Why the Sea is Salt, The Ugly Duckling, Jack and the Beanstalk, Two Frogs, The Snow Queen, Six Sillies, The Hedgehog and the Rabbit, Thumbelina, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Red Riding Hood, The Little Mermaid, Five Wise Words, The Goose-Girl, Beauty and the Beast, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Tinderbox, Little Fir Tree, The Bronze Ring, Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Boy Who Kept a Secret, The Magic Kettle.
Featuring the stories: The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Snow White and Rose Red, It's Perfectly True!, Tom Thumb, The Nightingale, Chicken Little, The Frog Prince, Cinderella, The Princess and the Pea, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, The Golden Goose, Why the Sea is Salt, The Ugly Duckling, Jack and the Beanstalk, Two Frogs, The Snow Queen, Six Sillies, The Hedgehog and the Rabbit, Thumbelina, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Red Riding Hood, The Little Mermaid, Five Wise Words, The Goose-Girl, Beauty and the Beast, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Tinderbox, Little Fir Tree, The Bronze Ring, Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Boy Who Kept a Secret, The Magic Kettle.
MY THOUGHTS: This is a small hardcover without a dust jacket, measuring 8 1/4" x 5 1/2" x 1 1/8" and weighing 1lb. 8 oz. The top of the pages are gold. This was originally published by Random House in 1967 as one huge 800+ page volume with the same illustrations on the dust jacket as this one from 1983 but a different color. The pages of my 1983 edition are thick and of good quality. Each story has one full page, full color illustration. All illustrations were done by Fritz Kredel and can be seen here. There's information in the back of the book about where each story chosen for this anthology came from, which book it was previously published in, and what year. As far as translations go I couldn't tell you if these stories were translated good or not.
The stories are hit or miss as all fairy tales are. I like the darker ones, so I like the well-known ones in here best, like The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Red Riding Hood and Chicken Little. This has the original Charles Perrault version of Cinderella, not the darker Grimm's version. Most of these stories are very violent and gruesome. very, especially Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, which makes me think of a Beastie Boys song. My least favorite is The Boy Who Kept a Secret because he beats a woman and smacks another one and still wins in the end. Perhaps the saddest one, to me, is The Little Mermaid. It actually made me sad. The cutest one was Two Frogs and made me giggle. I didn't grow up reading fairy tales so as an adult I'm getting into them, so I enjoyed this book, and the illustrations. Illustrations always make stories better, preferably ones in color.
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