Customer Reviews

Philippine Folk Tales

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This is the book of Philippine tales written down by Mable Cook Cole. The stories themselves are mostly folk-tales (surprise!) although there are a few that a Western audience might consider to be fairy tales instead (most notably the first few, and a handful towards the end). There are nearly seventy tales in all (many very short), so you'll have to forgive me for not listing them.

The book is broken up by cultural group, with a brief explanation of each culture followed by a few stories. The stories tend toward the macabre at times, though overall they aren't any worse than Grimm's. You'd probably want to read over them before reading them to children, though. Just to make sure.

The language was good and the stories were good, but I have a few minor issues with the book. First, the end-notes aren't linked. They are marked, and if you'd like to slow your reading to a crawl you can use the search function to locate them, but they aren't active links, which can be frustrating. There's also no active Table of Contents, which I know bothers some people.

Second, there's a slight Euro-centrism to the stories. It wasn't really bludgeoningly obvious, but the cultures studied are referred to as 'primitive' and 'savage' at times, among other things. This was a sign of the times (the book was written in 1916), but it's so foreign to the current way of thinking that it leaves a bad aftertaste. This came out more in notes and informative-bits than in the stories, so it's just a minor concern if you're interested in the stories, but it is something to keep in mind.