The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver Von Schonwerth Publisher: Penguin Classics (2015)
eARC (288 pages)
Via: NetGalley
Rating:
Reading Challenges: 2015 Alphabet Soup, Read 2015
Synopsis
With this volume, the holy trinity of fairy tales – the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen – becomes a quartet. In the 1850s, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth traversed the forests, lowlands, and mountains of northern Bavaria to record fairy tales, gaining the admiration of even the Brothers Grimm. Most of Schönwerth’s work was lost – until a few years ago, when thirty boxes of manuscripts were uncovered in a German municipal archive. Now, for the first time, Schönwerth’s lost fairy tales are available in English. Violent, dark, and full of action, and upending the relationship between damsels in distress and their dragon-slaying heroes, these more than seventy stories bring us closer than ever to the unadorned oral tradition in which fairy tales are rooted, revolutionizing our understanding of a hallowed genre.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Find the book: Goodreads
I really like to read fairy tales. I would read them all the time. They don’t need to be modern retellings to be awesome.
I really enjoyed the tales told in The Turnip Princess. The tales aren’t the cleaned up versions with perfect endings like the Disney versions. Some of these stories aren’t ones that I would want to read to little children before bed. Then again, I wouldn’t want to with some of the Grimm stories either.
The stories in this volume are great because they take the types (basic plot structures) we know and love and change them up a bit. There are surprises that I didn’t expect to see and twists that make these stories unique.
I found these stories enjoyable and was glad that I was able to read them.
Which Reading Challenges?
- You Read How Many Books? Reading Challenge
- Alphabet Soup Reading Challenge (T)
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
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