Customer Reviews

African Folk Tales (Dover Children's Thrift Classics)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an inexpensive, yet wonderful collection of African folk tales. They are brilliant- a must-have!

I think that this book is a wonderful life lesson to many youngsters out there.From the jungles of Africa to a lion's mouth, these stories wil take your eyes to a whole new world!

I do not recommend paying more than $3 for this book because it is small, short, and not well bound. However, the stories are decently interesting and my son loved it.

This is quite a short book of about 60 pages covering 18 well known West African folk tales. Almost all these traditional stories involve animals of one sort or another, be they tortoises, leopards, elephants, dogs, goats, camels, crocodiles etc. All but a couple of the stories are accompanied by a black and white line illustration and they are reprinted from a book originally published in the late 1950s.

Examples of the stories are The Story of a Farmer and Four Hyenas, The Greedy but Cunning Tortoise, The Magic Crocodile and a Good Fortune in Camels.

Personally I found these stories quite charming and very evocative of the part of the world they originate from. I imagine children will love them and read this little volume again and again. Perfect for bedtime reading and the stories are about the right length for this.

Like the old European fairy tales, this book has a lot of stories in which the characters, many of them animals, get eaten or somehow die. The book is very inexpensive, which is nice but I don't recommend this for small children.