Publisher's Synopsis
Twelve fairy tales from a great geographic range, mostly from across Europe, with two from North America and one from Japan. The tone of this story book is gentle and familiar, but without shying away from the occasionally gruesome details that make fairytales so enticing for younger readers. While many of the tropes are similar to the fairytales we are all familiar with from the Grimm brothers, with lots of events occurring in threes and forgotten younger siblings often turning out to have the wisdom, kindness or bravery their older siblings lack, these are a set of entirely different stories from around the world. The collective imagination of the various fairy tale tellers must have been limitless to create such a wide range of these magical stories. In the first of these stories, the Irish story Yellow Lily, the hero is a cocky young prince who loves to gamble, and is saved from a grisly fate by the eponymous Yellow Lily. Yellow Lily is a heroine who doesn't mind using her wits to lash the hero when he needs it, rather than a merely a meek story device. This story also contains the great tongue twister "Yellow Lily of Loch Lein," try saying that with your mouth full! Each of the other stories are at least as fascinating, such as the Scandinavian tale The Mysterious Prince which starts like Beauty And The Beast and ends very differently, or the Canadian The Goddess Of Light, which reads like a cross between Bluebeard and a creation myth. Princes, princesses, elves and giants all abound in these stories, and the evil ones are guaranteed to get their comeuppance.
