Fairytales for Fearless Girls - Review

Author: Anita Ganeri

Genre: Middle Grade 

Format: eBook

Pages: 128

Every so often I find a gem hidden in the shelves of my local library, this was one of them. I'm always a sucker for a book of Fairy Tales, particularly ones I've never heard of before. So I was excited when this came across my dash through my library's virtual shelves. However, this one kind of hit the middle of the road for me. 

Let's start with I liked it because there is a lot to like about these stories.

I loved how diverse these stories are. This is an around the world trip of girls who didn't wait in their towers to be rescued. They went out and found their own way, saved their families and their people, and found their own happy endings. It's a beautiful way to introduce young, and not so young, readers to the mythologies and stories of different cultures. 

The artwork that accompanies each story by Khoa Le is absolutely beautiful and adds a wonderful visual aspect to each story. I really liked that I was able to blow up each image with my digital version and get a better look at each. While the pieces are small, they are beautiful and give us a small glimpse of each of our fearless girls.

I really liked that not all of the girls had to find a husband to live happily ever after. Many were content with a place in court or going back to their families with riches. I was also impressed that not all of these girls were fighting evil, but some were just out-witted their foe who assumed because they were going up against women they would win.

Also, since I thought the stories were easy to follow and had been translated well. I know a lot of stories like this have been told through word of mouth more often than written down, but each story felt complete even if a few seemed to just suddenly end. Each felt a folk story with a moral, or story told before bed.

However, the stories themselves are just sort of thrown together, and I know there are only 15 of them in the book. I still felt like they could have been organized into some kind of order. The themes of the stories seemed to bounce around which for me made them feel a bit disjointed. Also, the book starts off with its weakest story in my opinion. I almost didn't read past it but told myself to give it one or two more stories, and I'm glad that I did. Because the stories did get better the farther in the book you get.

I might have given this another star if the stories had been gathered together by theme or categories. But, it made it hard to read this one sitting with the stories just sort of thrown into no real order.

Now, it does mean it's the perfect kind of bedtime book to read one or two stories each night. Which I did to offset a more depressing nonfiction read. So, in the end, I thought this was cute and enjoyed it and was glad I borrowed it from my local library.

HAPPY READING!!