These are one of my favorite story collections. I read these when I was about six years old. They are probably one of the reasons I love dark, macabre stories. These are not the Disney fairy tales that you see in the movies. These are from a time when life was difficult at best. Perhaps there are happy endings but it was very clear that if you were not of the pure of heart or who tried to do the right thing you would most certainly would come to a bad end.

Reading Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales was a repetitive process. My 630-page leather edition (from Barnes and Noble Books) included numerous retellings of stories very similar; it felt as if the compilers were taking translations from multiple sources. 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. 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.

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