I always loved fairytales when I was a little kid––and no, not the silly watered-down ones. I liked the real, hardcore shit. The fairytales where everyone dies. Those are the good ones. Those Disney princess movies always bored me. (Except I loved Beauty and the Beast, because Belle isn't a dumbass

I can't believe the level of nostalgia this book created. Not every story is equally memorable, but the ones that lingered over decades (yes, plural!) in my mind make this worth every star.

Lang wrote some of the stories, but he largely edited this collection. Like the Grimms, but far more honest, Lang used translations provided by his wife and other women (he thanks the women in his introduction, gives credit to original sources at the end of the tales).

It makes this collection, the f

"She lives in a castle which lies east of the sun and west of the moon..."

Of all the fairy book spectrum, I'm glad I started with blue. More than a few old favourites in here, in particular the stories East of the Sun, West of the Moon, and Beauty and the Beast. It's lovely regardless, I think, to f

My main takeaway from Lang's "Blue Fairy Book"? "Happily ever after" is far from the norm! These tales include grizzly murders, playing on insecurities, forced marriages, abductions, and maniacal little people. Take "Prince Hyacinth and the Dear Little Princess" as an example.
If you had a complex ab

Some of these are familiar - Red Riding Hood suffers a brutal end, Rumpelstiltskin gets ripped off again, Cinderella earns her name by cleaning out the chimney and having dainty feet, but Jack and the Giant-killer makes you wonder how we got the modern day Jack and the Beanstalk. Toss in a sedate an

Thirty-seven stories which vary in length and enjoyability.
It was a fun read, I wouldn't read some of the stories to my nephews or my kids in the future.

From the famed The Blue Fairy Book, I learned that:

1. If you are a girl, and you are "beautiful", so amazingly pretty that sometimes, there are just no words to describe you, you might just survive whatever is coming at you next, because

2. The villains can never defeat the good, because someway or o

This collection contains many classic fairy tales and only a few that were new to me. Some stories are better than others, but mostly good. I was pleased to recognise some of the stories that I remembered from my childhood and that I had forgotten (Toads and Diamonds, Trusty John, The story of the p

What I love most about this book is that they are “non-Disney” endings. We all enjoy discussing them, whether bizarre or as we expected. My son (7) and I have enjoyed taking turns reading this aloud to each other all year. We picked up the Red Fairy Book too because we enjoyed this one so much.