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A review by paperrhino
Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
3.0
The first thing I did not realize when I started reading this text is it's size. I suppose that is one of the drawbacks of eBooks. This book is over 1100 pages of stories that range from a couple of pages to nearly 100 and the quality of the stories vary widely. For every "The Little Mermaid," "The Emperor's New Clothes", and “The Shadow” there are two or three obscure and usually not very interesting stories.
Over all the stories have a very strong Christian theme and the moral of the story is almost always related to a church teaching or involve God or angels stepping in to reward the much suffering main character. Consequently the tone of many of the stories is a little preachy which took rather than added to the stories in my opinion. The stories are also usually less bloody and dark than the reputation of the stories collected by the brothers Grimm have (I've not yet read their collection). Some of the stories are really well thought out with a good story arch and some character development like “The Snow Queen.” Others are disjoint and random like “What the Moon Saw” which reminded me of Mussorgsky's “Pictures at an Exhibition” with its random milieus.
A major complaint I have with this edition is that five or six of the stories show up more than once under different names throughout the book (Barnes and Noble The Complete Collection of Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales). I don't know if this was an oversight or if Anderson originally published it that way but in either case I found it quite annoying.
I can not say I recommend this book to anyone except for hard core fairy tale readers. Stick with an abridged version which only includes the more famous and better stories which are quite good.
Over all the stories have a very strong Christian theme and the moral of the story is almost always related to a church teaching or involve God or angels stepping in to reward the much suffering main character. Consequently the tone of many of the stories is a little preachy which took rather than added to the stories in my opinion. The stories are also usually less bloody and dark than the reputation of the stories collected by the brothers Grimm have (I've not yet read their collection). Some of the stories are really well thought out with a good story arch and some character development like “The Snow Queen.” Others are disjoint and random like “What the Moon Saw” which reminded me of Mussorgsky's “Pictures at an Exhibition” with its random milieus.
A major complaint I have with this edition is that five or six of the stories show up more than once under different names throughout the book (Barnes and Noble The Complete Collection of Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales). I don't know if this was an oversight or if Anderson originally published it that way but in either case I found it quite annoying.
I can not say I recommend this book to anyone except for hard core fairy tale readers. Stick with an abridged version which only includes the more famous and better stories which are quite good.