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Summary
Summary
From once upon a time to happily ever after, these are the fairy tales everyone knows and loves. Here you will find the princess who kisses a frog, the fairy godmother who changes everything, and the ugly duckling who becomes a graceful swan.
Master artist Michael Hague has selected and illustrated this enchanting collection, compiled especially for reading aloud with the whole family. Through his luminous paintings, readers will rediscover all the magic of these beloved childhood classics.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 3-This collection brings together 14 folk- and fairy tales, including "Beauty and the Beast," "Cinderella," "The Little Mermaid," and "The Three Little Pigs," retold simply and in a large format for sharing aloud. Many of the more violent plot points have been dampened down or omitted completely, though the girl in "The Seven Ravens" does cut off her own finger and Snow White's stepmother "feasted on what she thought was Snow White.." Jewel-toned paintings done in pencil, pen-and-ink, watercolor, and Adobe Photoshop decorate each story with complex, rich details that are occasionally a bit frightening. Overall this volume serves as a nice introduction to these well-known tales and will be useful in library collections, but unfortunately no sources are cited, even for the Hans Christian Andersen tales. The flap copy references "The Frog Prince," which is not actually included in the book.-Julie Roach, Cambridge Public Library, MA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
This fairy tale anthology features 14 simplified versions of classic stories including "Cinderella," "Rumpelstiltskin," and "The Three Little Pigs," accompanied by gilded paintings that honor their fantastic, enigmatic, and sometimes terrifying content. Beauty's Beast is a shrieking, wolflike ghoul; Hague's illustrations for "The Little Mermaid" evoke the Art Nouveau movement, his sea witch a cross between Medusa and an octopus; and Little Red Riding Hood's cape trails behind her in sinuous and sinister tendrils as she crosses the dark forest. While MacDonald's abbreviated retellings don't linger on the grimmer elements of the tales, the material isn't overly laundered either (in "Snow White," the queen "feasted on what she thought was Snow White, satisfied that she had rid herself of her beautiful stepdaughter"). Ornate visual details provide a gateway for readers to uncover the symbolism and unspoken complexities behind these familiar stories. Ages 4-8. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
This collection of fourteen popular fairy tales includes four by Andersen. Many of the digital pictures are beautiful and pay homage to Arthur Rackham's illustrations and Art Deco style, though some have odd compositions and contain rather frightening images. MacDonald retells the tales with a slightly heavy hand and with some changes to details. There is no source information. (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Fourteen familiar tales are retold in their simplest and most bloodless forms for reading aloud to very young children--an approach somewhat subverted by Hague's powerful and somewhat surreal pictures. It opens with "Beauty and the Beast," and the Beast is genuinely terrifying. Cinderella's sisters are forgiven so long as they "promise to be good." Rumpelstiltskin does not tear himself in two but disappears in a huff. Snow White's lips are "red as a rose," and the evil queen's fate is elided. The stories are kept quite short, and usually, as in "The Ugly Duckling" and "Jack and the Beanstalk," the moral or lesson is writ large. Perhaps the least familiar tale is that of "The Seven Ravens," in which a girl saves her seven brothers, who had been turned birds--an act that involves her cutting off her little finger. Hague's illustrations are rich in saturated color and sinuous line, and they owe a debt to both the painter Gustav Klimt and the illustrator Arthur Rackham. Some of the motifs seem familiar from other images in Hague's long career of illustrating fairy tales. It could be argued that simplifying and softening these tales does neither the stories nor their audience any good, but for those who want short and sweet versions, they are here. (Fairy tales. 4-7)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
with their violent excesses and winning magic, fairy tales once entertained adults and children together. As John Updike said, they were the television and pornography of an earlier age, and they rarely pulled punches, even when the young were listening in. Today, fairy tales move on two different tracks: films like "Snow White and the Huntsman" and television series like "Once Upon a Time" add existential torment, surreal plot twists and macabre special effects for their adolescent and adult audience, while adaptations for children tame the tales' original melodrama and impose moral lessons on their plotlines. Lisbeth Zwerger's "Tales From the Brothers Grimm" and Michael Hague's "Read-to-Me Book of Fairy Tales" draw children into nostalgic fairy-tale worlds with the seductive beauty of their illustrations. "Fairy Tale Comics," edited by Chris Duffy and animated by 17 cartoonists and illustrators, by contrast, refashions classic tales with bold creativity, reminding us that, as Italo Calvino put it, a fairy tale is always "more beautiful" (and more interesting) when something is added. And then there is "Princess Tales," adapted by Grace Maccarone and illustrated by Gail de Marcken, which enlivens the stories with rhymes, seek-and-find pictures, busy illustrations and unusual settings. This last volume takes a sentimental turn and is the safest choice for parents anxious about what Bruno Bettelheim, endorsing the therapeutic value of the unforgiving violence in fairy tales, called the uses of enchantment. Some of the stories in Zwerger's "Tales From the Brothers Grimm" reveal just how hard it is to cover up the primal energy of fairy tales. In one, a young queen takes out a contract on her husband who, despite many heroic feats, remains "nothing but a tailor." "Hans My Hedgehog" features a hero - half-boy, half-hedgehog - who is so vexed with a young woman who refuses to marry him that he takes off her beautiful clothes and pricks her with his quills until she bleeds. Then he chases her back home, where no one has "a good word for her all the rest of her days." This is followed by "The Children of Hamelin," a version of "The Pied Piper" that bluntly declares: "In all, a hundred and thirty children had been lost." A poignant final illustration shows adults wandering the streets, one holding the hand of a limp doll, another pushing an empty carriage. Though Zwerger's watercolors are sometimes disturbing, the decorative beauty of her work also functions as an antidote to the violent content of the tales. This dynamic is reversed in Hague's "Read-to-Me Book of Fairy Tales": Allison Grace MacDonald's gentle prose mitigates the ferocity of some of Hague's illustrations. MacDonald uses an abundance of caution in retelling the tales, making sure, for example, that Rumpelstiltskin does not tear himself in two, as was the case in the Grimms' version, but simply stomps his foot in anger and disappears. In adult reworkings of fairy tales, almost anything goes, and in a creative flash, the girl in red can turn into Red Hot Riding Hood. When it comes to versions for children, the urge to preach becomes almost irresistible. We put tight constraints on improvisation, insisting on morals, even when they do not square with the facts of the story. MacDonald turns the audacious Jack into a repentant rogue who "knew he shouldn't have risked his life like that." Adventurous and beauty-loving Little Red Riding Hood is portrayed as disobedient (for talking to the wolf) and wayward (for picking flowers). In the end, she promises "never to stray from the path again," just as her mother had told her in the beginning. All versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" in these collections make the same point, even though staying on the path would not have changed a thing. In "Fairy Tale Comics," Little Red Riding Hood vows never to talk to strangers again, an update to the story, making it about stranger danger but ignoring the fact that conversation was never the real problem. Not surprisingly, "Fairy Tale Comics" is the most inventive and daring of the books, remaking the old tales and infusing them with manic liveliness and antic art. By including less familiar stories like "The Boy Who Drew Cats," "Give Me the Shudders" and "The Small-Tooth Dog," the collection reminds us that such tales can be refashioned because they shape-shift with such ease, never losing their edgy entertainment value, even when we work hard to domesticate them for the younger crowd. Once we orient fairy tales toward children, we forget that they were engineered for entertainment, less invested in sending messages than in producing shock effects so powerful that to this day we feel compelled to talk about them, reinvent them and pass them on. "If you want intelligent children," Einstein is said to have remarked, "read them fairy tales." He was surely less interested in simplistic morals than in how these stories use the sorcery of words to shock us into thinking about the terrible, complicated things that can happen before "happily ever after." That was the true educational value of the fairy tale. And he affirmed it by adding, "If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." MARIA TATAR directs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University.
