Customer Reviews

Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales (Dover Children's Thrift Classics)

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This book has some of my favorite Grimm fairy tales, & others which I have never had the opportunity to read before. In addition to Sleeping Beauty, it has Hansel & Gretel, The Frog Prince, Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood, Tom Thumb, & Rapunzel (my childhood favorite.)

The only thing I don't like is that it doesn't have as many illustrations as stories. Some of the stories aren't illustrated at all, & my daughter does not like this one bit.

I highly recommend the Grimm volumes from this series as a way of introducing your children to authentic fairy tales, preferably before they read/see the Disnified versions. Not only are they richer in language & imagery, & more culturally resonant, they also serve as an answer to the criticism that fairy tales are bad for girls because the heroines are passive & dependent upon others, especially men, for their salvation. In this volume, for instance, Sleeping Beauty awakens because her 100 years of sleep are finished. The spell was completed, which was why this particular prince was able to enter the castle & kiss her, while all the others who had tried had snagged on the thorns surrounding the enchanted castle. She did not awaken BECAUSE he kissed her.

To cite another example, after the huntsman rescues Red Riding Hood & her grandmother from the wolf, the next time another wolf comes to the door, the woman & girl work together to kill him.

In general, Grimm heroines do not wait passively to be rescued.