Reviews: (by author)

Child, Sam. The Rainbow Book of Nursery Tales. London: Hutchinson (Random House), 2003. 14.99 British Pounds. ISBN 0-09-188484-5

A very prettily, colorfully illustrated collection of retold fairy tales, this is a good introduction for young readers. Child has selected a good variety of stories and retold them very simply—thus the term "nursery tales." The book is sectioned in colored blocks—thus the title "rainbow." That is, a given section, say "All Creatures Great and Small," has red-framed pages; the section "Princes and Princesses" is Indigo—a good device for children who want to find a particular story easily.
I have two criticisms of the book. The first is that no credit anywhere is given to authors who wrote original fairy tales; Oscar Wilde's "The Selfish Giant" and HC Andersen's "The Princess on the Pea" would seem to be either stories made up by Child or else part of the common store of fairy tales, such as those retold by the Grimms. I do not see the reason for not acknowledging authors, even when their work is out of copyright. Suppose, for example, a child liked "The Selfish Giant." He or she would have no information about where to find other fairy tales by Wilde.
My second criticism is the version of "Little Red Riding Hood" incorporates and emphasizes the most patriarchal of the tellings: the Grimms' version that added the woodcutter who comes to save Little Red. In this version, the woodcutter is her father. Nice—but this removes any ability for saving herself with which the little girl is attributed in many other versions. Additionally, the story is called a "cautionary tale"—fine, but in Child's version, no warning is given to LRRH before she leaves for Grandma's, so where the caution?

Finally, in this LRRH version, Child writes that when LRRH first saw the wolf, she thought it was a dog. "She hadn't gone far when she met a big gray wolf. She thought that he was a dog and a clever dog at that, because he spoke to her." How dumb can a kid who lives near the forest be? Contrast this to James Thurber's very funny updated LRRH (In Further Fables for Our Time) in which LRRH at once recognizes that the wolf looks no more like her grandmother "than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge"—in Thurber's version, LRRH takes a pistol out of her goodie basket and shoots the wolf. Moral: "It's not as easy to fool little girls as it used to be."

These may be a professor's complaints, but they're worth noting when you make your selection of which collection of fairy tales to buy.

Alida Allison, October 2003

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