![]() ![]() She went to her room and took a white kerchief from her dresser drawer. So then she gets nervous, wondering what her husband will say when he comes home and finds his son beheaded. In this one the step-mother one day gets so irritated at her despised stepson that she beheads him by slamming down the lid of a chest while he is reaching in to get an apple. ![]() Perhaps the most extreme-horror tale is “The Juniper Tree”. I was expecting atrocities, dismemberments, rapes and cannibalism and I got that in spades, but my oh my, there are a few very alarming stories in here. Some I thought I knew but didn’t (“Puss in Boots”, “Rapunzel”). ![]() Two of them I knew just from Danny Kaye’s songs “The King’s New Clothes” and “The Ugly Duckling”. Reading this slowly over the last six months was like gathering pebbles from the beaches of my own childhood, some intimately familiar, some goldenhued and strange. This is a glorious handsome opulent edition of 26 famous stories festooned with notes by Professor Maria Tatar who is your perfect companion, full of insight and knowledge but not freezing – in fact she is slyly playful at times (Snow White in the glass coffin “becomes something of a tourist attraction”….and later : “fairy tale women seem to be unusually tolerant of the hedgehogs, pigs, snakes and other beasts that steal into their rooms at night, perhaps because the animals usually manage to make the transformation in to human form before getting between the sheets”). ![]()
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