The Bremen Town Musicians: And Other Animal Tales from Grimm

My 4 year old daughter loves animals and loves this book. It's the first book she has with more words than picures, so I'm surprised by how often she requests it. She clearly has a preference for the "Bremen Town Musicians" and "The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids" but I'm happy to have the whole collection. The stories don't have as much violence as the original Grimm tales, but they aren't sugar coated either.

Authors tackling Grimm Brother stories today have the difficult task of not always knowing what the best way to present the authors' original material is. If you've ever read a direct translation of a Grimm story then you know that they have a tendency towards violence, black and white terms of good and bad, didacticism, and some truly disgusting scenes. For her part, German born Doris Orgel has just translated and retold some of the Grimm Bros animal tales for the pleasure of young readers everywhere. Orgel recently translated the truly marvelous young adult novel, "Daniel Half Human and the Good Nazi", but her talents extend beyond rote rewrites. "The Bremen Town Musicians" is perhaps one of the smartest, friendliest, and beautiful picture books based on animal Grimm tales available to kids today. The tales included in this collection are the standard tale of the Bremen Town Musicians, The Hare and the Hedgehog, King of the Birds, When the Birds and the Beasts Went to War, The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids, and finally The Fox and the Geese. Some of these stories will sound familiar. The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids, for example, has only slight variations from the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. As such, it's probably the most violent of the tales (which is impressive when you consider the source). Each story is retold in an accessible and pleasurable way. Orgel, in her preface, notes that she made a few changes "skipping what seemed preachy or obscure, but always very carefully, so as not to harm the 'oldness,' because that's where the magic is". The result is a meticulous series of tales that are just as new an interesting today as they were when first conjured up. Of these stories, "The Fox and the Geese" was undoubtedly my favorite. Not just because I'd never heard the story before, but because there's a great deal of mature joking going on behind the tale. The illustrations in this tale are by Bert Kitchen and compliment the author's tone perfectly. In many ways, the pictures bear some similarities to those of fellow illustrator Genedy Spirin. They contain muted natural colors and characters with realistic looks. In this book, a donkey looks like a donkey and a fox looks like a fox. Kitchen never makes his characters cartoonish in any way, but that doesn't mean they don't engage in ridiculous behavior. There is a dignity to this book that, in the hands of any other illustrator, could easily have been lost. If Orgel feels like making a second collection of tales based on Aesop, I wouldn't object a jot. A companion book would be just the thing to accompany such this particular collection. In the meantime, consider pairing this book with, "Anno's Aesop: A Book of Fables" by Mitsumasa Anno for a well-rounded animal-based fable storytime. Both are necessary to any well-rounded children's literary collection.