Genies, Meanies, and Magic Rings: Three Tales from the Arabian Nights

I read this aloud to my children (age 7 and 9), and all three of us really enjoyed the stories! Very entertaining, and fun because they used modern expressions, and included amusing details. Also, there were lots of twists and turns that weren't in Disney movies or other versions of these stories, that made the stories extra interesting. I also really appreciated the fact that the story tried to clarify some moral points, in a nice way. My kids just begged and begged for me to keep reading just one more chapter. I would really recommend it.

Give Stephen Mitchell a looksee. Stare long and hard at him for a while. Really take him in. Why? Because, my friend, you are in the presence of a very smart man. A man who realized something that a lot of authors need to take into account. When it comes to classic tales like One Thousand and One Arabian Nights there are very few child-friendly versions of the tales that have been published in the last ten years. That doesn't stop my library patrons from asking for some, though. I'll hand them a thick text circa 1973 with copious words and few pictures and they'll give me that hurt puppydog look. The look that says, "Why won't you give me what I want?" And what they want (though they don't know the title yet) is "Genies, Meanies, and Magic Rings". A new look at three of the classic Arabian Tales, Mitchell has given new light to the well-known and even reintroduced stories that we might not have heard in their original incarnation before. A necessary purchase and then some. Three stories culled from "The Arabian Nights" appear in this volume, varying in fame. There is "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" (which has amazingly eluded Disneyfication until now) about a poor man named Ali Baba and his discovery of a cache of thieves gold. "Abu Keer and Abu Seer" looks at the story of two men, one good and one bad, and the various trials one must suffer at the hands of the other. Finally, "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp" rounds out the book and maintains its status as one of the world's finer stories for children. Look. Anyone who flips through the first ten pages of the original "Arabian Nights" will tell you right off the bat that it is NOT a work of fiction appropriate for children. There's some serious sex-related stuff in those stories, to say nothing of the awe-inspiring tortures and dismemberments that abound. That means that it was up to Mr. Mitchell to make the stories accessible to kids today. This is no easy task. Sometimes updating a classic tale or story goes all wrong. Consider, for example, Julius Lester's well-meaning but flawed retelling of the classic Brer Rabbit in, Uncle Remus: The Complete Tales. For the most part, Lester did a supremely wonderful job. But then he'd try to "update" the tales and throw in a reference to a shopping mall, or some similarly jarring image, and throw the whole story out of whack. I was a little worried that Mitchell here might go the same route. I needn't have worried. As he says in his Afterword, "I have kept the main story lines, but I have abridged, deleted, and expanded incidents, added and deleted dialogue, modified motivation and character, and made whatever other changes seemed appropriate in order to bring these tales to life in the English of today." Sometimes it's a physical change to the original story, and sometimes an emotional one. When Aladdin sees the beautiful princess for the first time we hear that, "Even though he had just seen her for the first time, it was as