A review by magnetarmadda
Russian Fairy Tales by Alexander Afanasyev

3.0

I feel bad rating a book filled with fairy tales from a whole culture at 3-stars, but it’s not because of the stories themselves, which were really interesting. It’s because of the translation of them and the awkward way they’re written. The end of the book has a fairly good explanation for this: when they were being collected by Afanas’ev, he was inspired by the Brothers Grimm. They have a particular way of telling stories, which I don’t like, and so this book has much the same feel. I’d love to read these fairy tales with a more smooth narrative style, so I’ll keep an eye out for a book like that