Barefoot Book of Fairy Tales

The Barefoot Book of Fairy Tales Retold by Malachy Doyle, Illustrated by Nicoletta Ceccoli This new collection of fairy tales has twelve of the world's favorites, each brightly illustrated with modern artistic style. You'll find some of your childhood favorites as well as some new ones because the book contains tales from around the world. The endnotes tell where each story originated and a little about the country. This is an educational slant to the telling of tales, many of which teach a moral lesson. You'll enjoy reading this with your children.

My daughter, 3 yrs, loves fairytales so we have read many. This is the best collection I have seen. Many collections have too few pictures. These stories are long but hold her attention when I read half at a time. The pictures are fairytale like. The book has Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty to appeal to my daughter but has many stories with male main characters, which appeals to my son as well. I loved reading "The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship" and wonder why I haven't ever come across it before. I think the ideal age is probably seven. My trouble with the book is the page at the end about barefoot books. They "focus on themes that encourage independence of spirit, enthusiasm for learning, and acceptance of other traditions." As a Christian, I don't have a problem with those themes but it is a bit of a red flag to me. Often those themes go a step further to no absolutes. I guess I am concerned that by supporting Barefoot Books I might be supporting other things that I might not agree with. Checking the website might clear that up. Otherwise, I didn't read anything in the book itself that I had a problem with as opposed to other Fairy Tales.

With excellent illustrations and a wide variety of stories, including a few interestingly uncommon ones, this is a great collection of fairy tales for kids ages five and up. Four are princess stories that we've all heard, four are popular non-princess tales and the other four are refreshingly new. In The Girl Who Became a Fish, a lazy girl turns into a fish after ignoring her mom's warning not to eat it, then uses her wits to locate and return a crown to the mermaid queen, breaking her own spell and that of the queen, and getting the prince as well. The best of the new stories was The Jeweled Sea, where a young man dreams of a girl, prophesying his marriage to her, and meets her soon thereafter, already promised to another, then journeys to the home of the genies on a mountain above the jeweled sea to find and bring back a jade pestle and mortar for the girl's mother, in exchange for the girl's hand in marriage. The rivers are full of monstrous creatures, but he's given magic seeds by the girl to shrink the rivers and a second set by his mother to return the rivers to their original sizes. He arrives to find that the mortar and pestle are gigantic and heavy, but smartly uses the power of the seeds to shrink them (and some jewels) down to a manageable size. When he returns, the girl is minutes from being married, but he proves the grooms greediness and wins back the bride by offering some enlarged jewels to the man in exchange for the bride. Both The Celestial Sisters and The Magic Ball are also good stories and it's a breath of fresh air to read these new (to me at least) fairy tales. Although the retellings of the stories are very good, the author pulls no punches when it comes to death, just like in the olden days when we were growing up. Some of the stories are probably not appropriate for children under five years of age.