Tales from the Brothers Grimm

with their violent excesses and winning magic, fairy tales once entertained adults and children together. As John Updike said, they were the television and pornography of an earlier age, and they rarely pulled punches, even when the young were listening in. Today, fairy tales move on two different tracks: films like "Snow White and the Huntsman" and television series like "Once Upon a Time" add existential torment, surreal plot twists and macabre special effects for their adolescent and adult audience, while adaptations for children tame the tales' original melodrama and impose moral lessons on their plotlines. Lisbeth Zwerger's "Tales From the Brothers Grimm" and Michael Hague's "Read-to-Me Book of Fairy Tales" draw children into nostalgic fairy-tale worlds with the seductive beauty of their illustrations. "Fairy Tale Comics," edited by Chris Duffy and animated by 17 cartoonists and illustrators, by contrast, refashions classic tales with bold creativity, reminding us that, as Italo Calvino put it, a fairy tale is always "more beautiful" (and more interesting) when something is added. And then there is "Princess Tales," adapted by Grace Maccarone and illustrated by Gail de Marcken, which enlivens the stories with rhymes, seek-and-find pictures, busy illustrations and unusual settings. This last volume takes a sentimental turn and is the safest choice for parents anxious about what Bruno Bettelheim, endorsing the therapeutic value of the unforgiving violence in fairy tales, called the uses of enchantment. Some of the stories in Zwerger's "Tales From the Brothers Grimm" reveal just how hard it is to cover up the primal energy of fairy tales. In one, a young queen takes out a contract on her husband who, despite many heroic feats, remains "nothing but a tailor." "Hans My Hedgehog" features a hero - half-boy, half-hedgehog - who is so vexed with a young woman who refuses to marry him that he takes off her beautiful clothes and pricks her with his quills until she bleeds. Then he chases her back home, where no one has "a good word for her all the rest of her days." This is followed by "The Children of Hamelin," a version of "The Pied Piper" that bluntly declares: "In all, a hundred and thirty children had been lost." A poignant final illustration shows adults wandering the streets, one holding the hand of a limp doll, another pushing an empty carriage. Though Zwerger's watercolors are sometimes disturbing, the decorative beauty of her work also functions as an antidote to the violent content of the tales. This dynamic is reversed in Hague's "Read-to-Me Book of Fairy Tales": Allison Grace MacDonald's gentle prose mitigates the ferocity of some of Hague's illustrations. MacDonald uses an abundance of caution in retelling the tales, making sure, for example, that Rumpelstiltskin does not tear himself in two, as was the case in the Grimms' version, but simply stomps his foot in anger and disappears. In adult reworkings of fairy tales, almost anything goes, and in a creative flash, the girl in red can turn into Red Hot Riding Hood. When it comes to versions for children, the urge to preach becomes almost irresistible. We put tight constraints on improvisation, insisting on morals, even when they do not square with the facts of the story. MacDonald turns the audacious Jack into a repentant rogue who "knew he shouldn't have risked his life like that." Adventurous and beauty-loving Little Red Riding Hood is portrayed as disobedient (for talking to the wolf) and wayward (for picking flowers). In the end, she promises "never to stray from the path again," just as her mother had told her in the beginning. All versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" in these collections make the same point, even though staying on the path would not have changed a thing. In "Fairy Tale Comics," Little Red Riding Hood vows never to talk to strangers again, an update to the story, making it about stranger danger but ignoring the fact that conversation was never the real problem. Not surprisingly, "Fairy Tale Comics" is the most inventive and daring of the books, remaking the old tales and infusing them with manic liveliness and antic art. By including less familiar stories like "The Boy Who Drew Cats," "Give Me the Shudders" and "The Small-Tooth Dog," the collection reminds us that such tales can be refashioned because they shape-shift with such ease, never losing their edgy entertainment value, even when we work hard to domesticate them for the younger crowd. Once we orient fairy tales toward children, we forget that they were engineered for entertainment, less invested in sending messages than in producing shock effects so powerful that to this day we feel compelled to talk about them, reinvent them and pass them on. "If you want intelligent children," Einstein is said to have remarked, "read them fairy tales." He was surely less interested in simplistic morals than in how these stories use the sorcery of words to shock us into thinking about the terrible, complicated things that can happen before "happily ever after." That was the true educational value of the fairy tale. And he affirmed it by adding, "If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." MARIA TATAR directs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University.

High production values give this mix of new and recycled translations and illustrations a suitably sumptuous air. Printed on coated stock and placed within spacious margins, the ruled blocks of text present as refined an appearance as the feathery, atmospherically detached scenes on most facing pages. Like Zwerger's figures, which are nearly all small on the page and tend to look off into the distance, Bell's translations are more often lyrical than intimate or earthy: "Once upon a time, when wishes could still come true, there was a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest was so lovely that the sun itself, although it had seen so much, marveled at her beauty whenever it shone on her face." "Hansel and Gretel," "The Bremen Town Musicians" and "Seven Ravens" were previously published in separate, somewhat different, English-language editions. In addition to these, the 11 tales here include "Hans My Hedgehog" and others rarely found outside much larger collections--and one surprise, the story of the Pied Piper, dubbed "The Children of Hamelin" after its German title in the Grimms' Deutsche Sagen. A belated companion to Zwerger's Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales (1992, 2006), similarly elegant of design and equally fine for reading alone or aloud. (introduction) (Fairy tales. 9-13)]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.