Maria Tatar

I loved this book! I am a kindergarten teacher who teaches little kids to read because reading is one of my favorite things in life. This is an exploration of the history of telling stories to children. From around the hearth with the whole family to today - where is a bedtime story is a battle to get them to sleep. She explores themes in popular classic children's novels and what makes them irresistible to children.

I would recommend this book to those of us who have loved reading since we were children. Be warned you will want to go back and analyze your favorite books as a child.… (more)

This book is so entertaining and revolutionary in how educational it is too. I haven't read the first edition, so I don't know how they compare, but the essays in this are so informative and interesting and really show how fairy tales and folk tales are such ubiquitous features of our culture, while also managing to deeply exploring the subtle undertones they have psychologically. For instance, I couldn't stop thinking about the way these tales were probably one of the first introductions girls had to the their possible future realities as I read through all the 'Beauty and the Beast' tales, and it definitely affected how I experienced them, which I think is for the better.

Plus, all the earlier versions of the tales shared are totally bonkers. Like, beyond bizarre, which is explained by how the OG fairy tales weren't meant as morals or lessons for kids, they were created to entertain adults during busy workdays (or just noble aristocrats for the readers of Charles Perrault).

Maria Tatar has also included a wide variety of cultures for each collection, so you really get the experience of how these tales are totally independent of each other and in different locations and times with different characters, and yet are so similar in composition. For instance, there's 'little red riding hood,' but there's also 'Tsélane and the Marimo' and 'The Tiger Woman' and all these other diverse versions of the narratives. With the explanatory essays to help, it's super interesting to see how everything ties together. It's almost... magical.

If you want to dive into the more academic side of fairy tales, or just want some weird reads that aren't in any of the larger collections like the Grimm's, Perrault's, or Andrew Lang's, then you should definitely give this a try; there are plenty of cheap online versions out there too, but the introductions to all the popular tale types included here (Bluebeard, Cinderella, Tricksters, etc.) really enhance the experience, so double win!… (more)