Belle Becker Sideman

I deeply loved this book when young, due to the vividness of the personal comments on the war from all sorts of people.
Looking at it more objectively, I think it may have a bit of leftist bias (Marx comes out looking very prescient) but overall I still think it is very good.

I have owned this book now for nigh on 40 years. It was gifted to my parents when I was born. I read it and re-read it and re-read many times as a child and I still enjoy the tales, even if they have been modified to make them more palatable. Even so, my favourite tale is "The Goose-Girl" mostly because of the sentence passed on the servant girl; it was gruesome to this child's mind, but I relished it and though she deserved it. The magic in the tale also captured my imagination, as it did show more in all the tales.

I doubt I will ever release this book and now that it has been retrieved from solitary confinement in storage, I hope to find a bookbinder to repair its sorry, leatherbound spine and restore it somewhat to its glory days. show less

I read several of the folktales from this collection and wanted to add it because of its dated quality. The tales have been thoroughly Westernized (Japanese Character pray to God, illustrations are littered with cultural stereotypes. For its time I'm sure this anthology was groundbreaking in its inclusion of other cultures, but today a lot of the then-forward ideas seem more backwards than progressive.

My mother had this book in her book collection when I was little and through it I discovered that there was much more to these tales than what the Disney versions would have you think. They can be much darker and deeper than they are portrayed on screen. This collection can also introduce someone to more than the standard stories. Because of this collection I think my favorites are "The Goose Girl", "East of the Sun, West of the Moon", and "The Six Swans".

I've read reviews here and show more elsewhere that say that these stories may have still been simplified a bit, but they are still a vast improvement over the Disney versions. I've yet to get a hold of a copy of the original Grimm or Anderson collections, but because of this book I've fallen in love with Fairy Tales and I can't really fault it much because of that. show less