A collection of fairy stories and folktales from all over the world.

As far as diversity goes, this is a good collection. Lang has compiled a wonderful assortment of stories from absolutely everywhere. The stories are nicely told, with good pacing and some lovely illustrations that really help capture that late 19th/early 20th century conception of the fairy tale.

However, these retellings are so colonial that I often had trouble even telling where each story was set until I reached the notations at the end. These may be world stories, but they're filtered through a decidedly British worldview. There's little to no local colour or regional feel. The translations all use the same basic voice. I found it frustrating after a while. I think my personal low came when a traditional Native American story contained a description of something that was "as fat as a Christmas turkey." It really made me wonder what else had been changed to conform to the period's conception of non-European cultures.

So this is a decent collection if you're just looking for a bit of fun, and it's a nice piece of nostalgia if you used to read the coloured Fairy Books when you were small. I wouldn't recommend approaching it as a serious cultural study, though, unless you're looking at how cultural biases affect storytelling. ( )

This collection was a lot of fun because it didn't have any (well, maybe 1 or 2) of the "traditional" European fairy tales. Instead there are stories from Africa, Australia, North America, India, Persia, Brazil, and many other places. Some of the stories seem strange compared to the fairy tales I grew up with, but the diversity makes The Brown Fairy Book one of Lang's best compilations (especially when accompanied by Ford's beautiful illustrations). ( )