The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder

The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (music) and Emanuel Schikaneder (libretto) holds a special place in my life: it was an opera my husband took me to when he was courting me. It’s been four years now, but I still feel giddy when I think about that special time when we were dating.

I’ve wanted to revisit the opera since then. I can’t exactly go to the opera these days (that’s what a baby and buying a house has done to my entertainment budget!) but I have had a wonderful time in the past few weeks visiting the opera in a number of forms. Continue reading »

Castle Waiting by Linda Medley

In Castle Waiting, Linda Medley delightfully tells some new fairy tales. Some of the tales are reminiscent of traditional fairy tales, but most of them are original in some clever way.

Castle Waiting is a rundown castle that is a refuge for a small community of outcast creatures. It is a place for acceptance, and learning the stories of the remarkable characters in the castle helps us to do so. Continue reading »

Beauty and the Beast + The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault

The Once Upon a Time III Challenge has a “Short Story Weekend” mini-challenge, so I thought I’d visit some fairy tales. To my surprise, the copy of Charles Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales that I found was less than 200 pages and written for children, so I breezed through all of them very quickly. Many of Perrault’s stories are retellings of other’s stories. My favorite was “Beauty and the Beast.” Continue reading »

The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi is almost a fairy tale. There is a magical fairy, there are talking animals, and of course, there is talking marionette who wants to be a real boy. And yet, Collodi’s tale fell just a little short of fairy tale status because of the obvious moralizing lessons: the lessons substantially subtracted from the fairy tale-like charm. Nonetheless, children may enjoy Pinocchio’s adventures, and they will probably also learn from Pinocchio’s mistakes and scold him for his foolish choices as they follow him along the path to becoming a real boy. Continue reading »

Pat the Bunny and Other Interactive Books for Kids

When I handed Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt to my son after I read it to him in the library, he got a really big kid smile on his face and he held it close to him. It’s a small book, just right for little hands. But the pleasure comes from the interaction: my son can pet the fuzzy bunny, he can lift a cloth to play peek-a-boo with the main character, and he can scratch Daddy’s face. According to Wikipedia, Pat the Bunny is the number 6 all-time best-seller for children’s books, even 50 years after first publication. I’m not surprised, because the textures and the activities make this a book perfect for little kids. Continue reading »

Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales

Reading Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales was a repetitive process. My 630-page leather edition (from Barnes and Noble Books; not same version as the Amazon link at left) included numerous retellings of stories very similar; it felt as if the compilers were taking translations from multiple sources. Then again, maybe the Grimm brothers wrote down similar stories with similar themes multiple times for their readers. They were, after all, trying capture the folk tales of the era; maybe those folk tales were likewise repetitive.

The Barnes and Noble edition I read did not include an introduction, so my experience was simply with the stories themselves. Despite the repetition of stories, I highly enjoyed reading the collection, especially as I took them slowly, reading a few stories (up to 20 or 30 pages) a day, mostly in the evening before bed. True “bedtime stories.”

But these stories probably aren’t for children, unless the children are pretty thick-skinned. (Note that I classify it, on this site, as Fiction, not Children’s Literature.) Grimm’s stories had blatant morals (such as how laziness leads to your death and wicked stepmothers who abuse children must, in the end, meet their horrendous end) and gruesome violence (such as stepmothers who decapitate stepchildren, girls so desperate to get a man they cut off their toes, and travelers who blind starving fellow travelers as payment for food).

Nevertheless, I still enjoyed the retreat into a world in which the animals one meets on the path are really princes in disguise, in which the dead come back to life, and in which magical fairies and witches regularly rescue those who really are deserving of assistance.

I don’t want to live in the world of the Brother’s Grimm. The violence and retribution is horrendous. Yet, the fairy aspects of the tales made some of them magical, and I look forward to visiting other fairy tales in the future – including Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen.

Have you read Grimm? What was your verdict: Violent or Magical? I, personally, am torn between the two. Continue reading »

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum

I was looking for something else light to read before Christmas when I found, via the Book Review Blog Carnival on Maw Books, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum, reviewed at The Movieholic and Bibliophile’s Blog. Best of all, because it is in the public domain, I could jump over to Project Gutenberg and read it without having to face snowy roads trying to get to a library.

I really enjoyed this short children’s novel about Santa Claus. Claus was orphaned near the woods of Burzee, and the immortal wood nymph Necile adopted him. He is raised by the wood nymphs, with other immortals to guide him: the Knooks, who direct animals; the Ryls, who color the flowers; and the fairies, who guard humans.

As a young man, Claus learns that he is from a race of humans, completely different from the immortals, and that many humans, including children, live in poverty and lack joy in their lives. In compassion, he leaves the sheltered life of the forest to minister to these children by making toys. The rest, you could say, is history. Continue reading »

The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling

If you like Harry Potter’s world, you’ll like J.K. Rowling’s latest edition to the cannon: The Tales of Beedle the Bard.

After each tale, which has been carefully “translated” from the ancient runes by Hermione Granger, we read Dumbledore’s commentary/critical analysis of the tale, with Rowling’s special notes for Muggle audiences. The Tales of Beedle the Bard is cleverly developed and my only complaint is that there are so few. Continue reading »

A Few Fairy Tale Reviews

I loved the Bookworms Carnival on fairy tales, and I put so many books on my TBR list. After reading through HTR&W‘s prologue all about irony and metaphor, I’ve turned to some of these great fairy tales this week for an escape to the world of imagination.

My community library only has a few of the ones I wanted to read and books cost twice as much here in Australia than in the USA, so I was limited in which ones I read this week. Anyway, here’s what I read, with my six-word reviews. Continue reading »

Aesop’s Fables with Introduction by G.K. Chesterton

In his introduction to a 1912 translation by V.S. Vernon Jones of Aesop’s Fables (available online here via Project Gutenberg), G.K. Chesterton claimed that Aesop’s fame “was all the more deserved because he never deserved it.” Chesterton continued:

“The firm foundations of common sense, the shrewd shots at uncommon sense, that characterise all the Fables, belong not to [Aesop] but to humanity.”

I agree to some extent: the themes in Aesop’s fables are universal. However, I also believe that Aesop (whomever he was) had an amazing ability to capture familiar human traits in such simple “impersonal” fables of just 3-10 sentences. We read them today because they remain relevant. After reading the fables attributed to Aesop, I believe Aesop does deserve every bit of the fame granted to him. Continue reading »