Subject Tag: retellings

Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston

Filed under: Fiction, Reviews

The introduction to my volume of Zora Neale Hurston’s retelling of the Biblical Exodus calls this a “badly flawed novel” and I’m sure it is. Hurston is basing her novel on a Biblical tale that lacks strong women characters, and she’s trying to make it feel modern. The introduction also criticizes the stereotyped way in [...]

Robinson Crusoe Adaptations for Children

Filed under: Child/Young Adult, Fiction, Reviews

In Chapter 6 of my history of children’s literature textbook, Children’s Literature, Seth Lerer indicates:
Almost from its original publication in 1719, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe had an immense impact on literature for children and adults. It has been widely seen as one of the first major novels in English; as the stimulus for a range [...]

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

Filed under: Child/Young Adult, Reviews, Short Stories

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 [...]

Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales

Filed under: Fiction, Reviews

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 [...]

How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster

Filed under: Nonfiction, Pondering Reading, Reviews

I saw How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster on the “New Nonfiction” shelf at the library. I thought I’d take a glance through it when I got home, but I certainly had no intention of reading it: I have a lot of books either in progress or on my bedside table, [...]

A few months ago, I read a version of Aesop’s Fables that I found online at Project Gutenberg, written and published in the early 1900s. I thought I’d read Aesop’s Fables.
I was interested, then, to read in chapter two (“Ingenuity and Authority”) of Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter [...]

A Few Fairy Tale Reviews

Filed under: Child/Young Adult, Fiction, Reviews, Short Stories

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 [...]

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