If you are at all interested in the Brothers Grimm, you should have this annotated collection. Maria Tatar is one of the absolute best historians of myth you can find. Lavishly illustrated. ( )

Fantastic resource. 37 tales, 9 additional for "adults." Bonuses: Grimms biography, illustration bibliography, additional reading suggestions, preface to 1st and 2nd editions of Grimm's tales.
According to the Preface: tales are from Grimm's 7th ed, published 1857. Selection includes tales that involve "magic" in some way. Also includes some background on the collection of tales and the revisions made over time (including those by the Grimm brothers).
Individual tales: full text accompanied by annotations that shed light on cultural norms of the day, revisions or alternate texts, symbolism and meanings. Illustrations reproduced from classic collections. ( )

5 stars for the stories, 5 stars for book design (including the many full-color Arthur Rackham and Walter Crane illustrations), but 2 stars for the annotations, which are almost without exception interpretive rather than explanatory.

The gold standard for annotated books has to be Leslie Klinger's "New Annotated Sherlock Holmes" (in this same series): his volumes are endlessly-fascinating compendia of information, rather like a museum of late Victorian England. By contrast, the annotations here are part literary criticism, part anthropology. You won't learn much about the world described. For example, in "The Three Little Men in the Woods", there was annotation marked for the sentence "the kitchen boy saw a duck swimming along in the drainage canal", and I was hoping for some explanation of drainage canals in German castles. E.g. what is drained; is the duck swimming in a river of sewage? Instead we get some dullish narratology: "the girl's ability to transform herself into a creature of nature can be traced to the wishes of the three little men. . ."

I wouldn't give this volume to a young person, for fear that the joyless, academic tone of the annotations would ruin the fairy tales, and make him never want to read one again. ( )

A great collection from a recognized scholar in the field. ( )

This is a lovely volume which my 9-year-old son and I are enjoying as a read-aloud. This edition, edited by Maria Tatar, is the first volume of fairy tales that has sustained his interest. ( )