Re: fairy tale recommendations

In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (beeswing) writes:

>I tried posting this yesterday, but I haven't seen it yet. I don't
>think it went out, but if it's a repeat, I'm sorry. Here's the
>question:

>My almost-9-year-old daughter has asked for a book of fairy tales for
>Christmas. She's an advanced reader who reads at the sixth grade
>level. I'd like to track down a regular-sized (not oversized and not a
>picture book, per se) version that would be engaging to a child this
>age. Illustrations would be a plus but not strictly necessary. I like
>Grimm's fairy tales, but if I did get her a copy of them, they'd have
>to be a lot less grim than the version I read as a child. (All I
>remember is something about a stepmother or a witch or someone similar
>putting on hot shoes and dancing till she died. That's *not* what I'm
>looking for!)

That last is going to make things a bit complicated, since folktales 
pretty much run into violence whenever you get enough of them together 
(even Perrault gets pretty grisly at times--after all, he's the one who 
simply has the wolf eating Little Red Riding Hood, the end).

You might find a suitable compromise with some of the themed 
collections--Mary Pope Osborne's Mermaid Tales from Around the World, Jane 
Yolen's Not One Damsel in Distress, Katrin Tchana's The Serpent Slayer, 
for a few examples, though I don't recall the plots of every story in 
them.  The old Andrew Lang collections are another possibility.

If your daughter is really upset by violence, though, it's going to be 
hard to find any folktale collection that's going to be problem-free (it's 
going to be hard to find many folktales that are problem-free :-)).  On 
the other hand, the fact she's asking for such collections may indicate 
that she's pretty okay with folktale happenings in context, but you 
obviously know your daughter better than I do.

-- 
Deborah Stevenson
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