I always loved fairytales when I was a little kid––and no, not the silly watered-down ones. I liked the real, hardcore shit. The fairytales where everyone dies. Those are the good ones. Those Disney princess movies always bored me. (Except I loved Beauty and the Beast, because Belle isn't a dumbass and she reads a lot––like meeee!)Anyway, if I recall correctly, I had at least one of Andrew Lang's fairytale collections when I was a kid … maybe a couple of them. Then, this past month, I had an ass...

This collection contains many classic fairy tales and only a few that were new to me. Some stories are better than others, but mostly good. I was pleased to recognise some of the stories that I remembered from my childhood and that I had forgotten (Toads and Diamonds, Trusty John, The story of the prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou). Since the tales seem to be quite long, one hopes the littlies will have the patience to listen to them till the end … or fall asleep, which isn’t a bad outcome ei...

Delightful fairytales for all ages.

Some of these are familiar - Red Riding Hood suffers a brutal end, Rumpelstiltskin gets ripped off again, Cinderella earns her name by cleaning out the chimney and having dainty feet, but Jack and the Giant-killer makes you wonder how we got the modern day Jack and the Beanstalk. Toss in a sedate and castle-heavy Aladdin and it just doesn't hold as much charm. The Story of Pretty Goldilocks is definitely not the version with three bears and porridge. The Bronze Ring is long-winded, bizarre, all

I've been working my way through this for about five years. I'm sure I read it when I was younger, but fairy tales never get old for me. I mainly listened to it on my Kindle at night around bedtime, and that was a great format. Fairy tales have some good lessons for the listener. Perseverance, doing good deeds for others, being clever, and to never underestimate one's circumstances. Poor people can become kings, queens, princes or princesses. They can also be disturbing in how children and many

It was very fun to listen to all these different fairytales (with which I had varying levels of familiarity)! Like is often the case with collections of stories I liked some more than others.

I can't believe the level of nostalgia this book created. Not every story is equally memorable, but the ones that lingered over decades (yes, plural!) in my mind make this worth every star.

What I love most about this book is that they are “non-Disney” endings. We all enjoy discussing them, whether bizarre or as we expected. My son (7) and I have enjoyed taking turns reading this aloud to each other all year. We picked up the Red Fairy Book too because we enjoyed this one so much.

"She lives in a castle which lies east of the sun and west of the moon..."Of all the fairy book spectrum, I'm glad I started with blue. More than a few old favourites in here, in particular the stories East of the Sun, West of the Moon, and Beauty and the Beast. It's lovely regardless, I think, to fall every now and then into a world where, even before first sight, people can fall so deeply in love that they can't eat or drink (view spoiler)[not the sort of behaviour that ought to be encouraged,...

It would appear that Lang compiled these stories "as is" without any editing. Some were very good and some were very bad. It didn't help that the narrator of my audiobook version got very screechy with some of her voices.Still, it was a fascinating look at some of the original versions of famous tales. In this book's version of Sleeping Beauty, she and the prince had to hide their kids from his mother who was an ogre who loved to eat children. (!) In Red Riding Hood no hunter comes in to save th...

We completed this with the Memoria Press literature guide (which I highly recommend!). My son enjoyed the stories, but said they were a little strange.

my becoming-a-genius project, part 7!if you are still there, and therefore presumably have not seen projects 1 through 6, here's the sitch:i have decided to become a genius.to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the collected stories of various authors, reading + reviewing 1 story every day until i get bored / lose every single follower / am struck down by a vengeful deity.i'm mixing it up this time mostly because i ran out of short story collections and am trying to get even somew...

From the famed The Blue Fairy Book, I learned that:1. If you are a girl, and you are "beautiful", so amazingly pretty that sometimes, there are just no words to describe you, you might just survive whatever is coming at you next, because2. The villains can never defeat the good, because someway or other, there will always, out of the blue, and completely deus ex machina-like, pop out these magical items that might just save the beautiful girl's ass(oops, I mean, her cute behind). 3. You just hav...

Thirty-seven stories which vary in length and enjoyability.It was a fun read, I wouldn't read some of the stories to my nephews or my kids in the future.

revisiting childhood favourites

Haha! These are great! Creepy and funny and gruesome. These ARE your grandmother's fairytales! HeeHeeHee!

Lang wrote some of the stories, but he largely edited this collection. Like the Grimms, but far more honest, Lang used translations provided by his wife and other women (he thanks the women in his introduction, gives credit to original sources at the end of the tales).It makes this collection, the first, rather interesting. By and large, the stories are mostly from the Grimms and French Salons. They include well known favorites like "Cinderella" but also lesser known ones such as "The Yellow Dwa...

Hmmm. I loved this book and fairy tales in general when I was a kid bur retracing them only makes me a little sad at the realization that they are pretty much tales of horrible family betrayal and that the real moral of many of them is that as long as you are the most beautiful princess and the youngest then it will probably turn out ok.

3 stars for the audiobook; 4 stars for the book itself. See my review of the Kindle edition for a brief review of the book.While I thought that Angele Masters did some very good voices (and a very good Scots accent for the last two tales), there were recurring mouth sounds (mostly sounds of swallowing) that put me off. Glad that I picked up this audiobook as a free Whispersync deal, but that brings me to another problem I had with this audiobook. It didn't actually sync with the Kindle book prop...

I'm excited to be re-reading these!I appear to have bookmarked (on my e-reader) the story of Prince Hyacinth and the Dear Little Princess, perhaps because the female Fairy has a large role. In fact, I had sort of forgotten what a significant percentage of traditional fairy tales - even western ones - have active women using agency. Hint: They're mostly not the ones that people today are aware of, because they're not the ones retold in the media.Anyway, more of my bookmarks: I really liked The Ta...