Fairy tales can be so much fun. A tale might have a big bad wolf, a curious little girl, a boy who wouldn't grow up, or a frog. It might be about a dropped shoe, a wicked spell, and ogre, or a king. The vast setting, personalities, and plots probably set this next to science fiction as the genre with the widest range of stories to tell. I've said before that fairy tales was my very first genre. Today, at the request of one of our dearest followers, I bring you another fairytale.

The Blue Fairy Book

By Andrew Lang

Published by Public Domain Books

About the book:

      This book has thirty-eight stories in it, some familiar, some not. Even the familiar ones are not what we have come to know. The book includes Snow White and Cinderella though many will be surprised at the original stories told in the late 1800's. Also included are The White Cat, Little Thumb, and the Wonderful Sheep. Lang collected these stories from all over the world and though created a group of twelve fairy books, each of their own color. The Blue Fairy Book was the first. Since the stories were collected world wide, his wife did much of the translating for the anthology.

      The Kindle version of the Blue Fairy Book is a free download. If you don't have a kindle, you can download a computer version of it and use that to read it. The hard copy of the book is published by NuVisions Publications and may be of better quality. I do know that the illustrations found in the original book are not in the ebook format.

      The first thing the reader should be aware of is this was a collection made in the late 1800's and our speech patterns have changed considerably since then. The second thing is, many of these storied were collected from foreign lands. The translations may not be up to snuff.

My Take:

   I read this book when I was eight. It was one of those library books I waled so far to get. I loved it and went on to read several more 'color' fairy books. Now that I am much older, I find the stories quite interesting but the writing is not quite what we have come to expect. Much of this is due to the folklore nature of how the stories were collected. Add in a translation or two and you wind up with an imperfectly written book.  Still, I rank this somewhat high on fairy tale collections, mostly because you can get the original oral stories. For instance you might find the story of Beauty and the Beast much more complex than the version we have now.

  I would recommend this to anyone who loves fairy tales, especially those who can over look the language problems.