Fairy Tales: A Classic Collection

This is a collection of ten ‘classic’ European Fairy stories attributed to The Brothers Grimm (Snow White), Perrault (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Puss-in-Boots, Little Thumb, Little Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard), and Hans Christian Andersen (The Ugly Duckling and The Princess and the Pea), while The Three Little Pigs is billed as a ‘traditional tale’. No compiler is attributed and there are six illustrators. The whole is unusually produced with a sturdy wrap-over cover with Velcro fastenings.

To me this is an extremely odd assortment of stories to be packaged together. Unwary purchasers may be deceived by the depiction of a jolly Red Riding Hood skipping through the woods depicted on the cover into thinking that this is a light-hearted collection for young readers and listeners, but within lie some very dark tales indeed with the bloody horrors of child murders in Little Thumb and the wife killings perpetrated by Bluebeard. More serious students of the genre may at least be interested in seeing the illustrative interpretations of (to a UK audience) less well-known French and German artists such as Marc Boutavant and Katja Gehrmann.