This is a story from the Andersen's Fairy Tales collection.
The world of Hans Christian Andersen is seen through the eyes of children. There is the everyday wonder of an ugly duckling being transformed into a swan; the puffed-up Emperor being fooled by his own importance; the tender tragedy of a little match girl; the upright honesty of John rewarded by his traveling companion. By bringing true feelings to these stories, Andersen's tales have become part of universal folklore.
Most helpful customer reviews
151 of 160 people found the following review helpful.
Best of its Kind
By Amazon Customer
I have been slowly (so veeeerrry slooooowlllly) working my way through all the Hans Christian Andersen books available for kindle. This is the only one I would suggest reading.
Not only does this version have an active table of contents and lack any of the distracting misplacement of page numbers and illustration names that several of the others have (although it's still not illustrated), but it contains what appears to be every story ever written by Hans Christian Andersen!
Long stories (The Ice Maiden), short stories (The Princess and the Pea), well-known stories (The Little Mermaid), unknown stories (She was Good for Nothing) and dozens of others are all contained within these e-ink pages!
They are also readable! This is not the case with some of the other HCA books on kindle. The stories are still really boring, occasionally tedious, generally depressing and often religious, but yet I can read them without wanting to scream and pull my hair out as I did with What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales. Instead they are somehow magically more approachable and I can almost remember why I loved Hans Christian Andersen so much as a child (selected stories from, at least).
So if you, like me, are determined to try and re-visit your childhood via fairy tales written by Hans Christian Andersen no matter what, at least take pity on yourself--or pity on your children if you're trying to read the stories to them--and read this version.
66 of 67 people found the following review helpful.
Andersen's Fairy Tales
By Amazon Customer
Includes a few long stories (The Shoes of Fortune; The Snow Queen) and a bunch of short stories (The Emperor's New Clothes; The Real Princess) by Hans Christian Andersen, although this is by no means all that he wrote.
A more definitive collection of his work is Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen.
Stories included are:
The Emperor's New Clothes
The Swineherd
The Real Princess (this is the Princess and the Pea)
The Shoes of Fortune
The Fir Tree
The Snow Queen
The Leap-Frog
The Elderbush
The Bell
The Old House
The Happy Family
The Story of a Mother
The False Collar
The Shadow
The Little Match Girl
The Dream of Little Tuk
The Naughty Boy
The Red Shoes
44 of 44 people found the following review helpful.A wonderful book for adults and children
By Guinevere Cuthbert
I have always been a fan of the original versions of fairy tales, so I picked this book up a few years ago, just to read for myself. A few weeks ago my six year old found it hidden among my millions of other books, and asked me to read it to her. While easy to read silently, it is a bit hard to get into the rythm of the wording at first, but after stumbling through a few paragraphs, it becomes much easier to handle.
Since the discovery of this book, my children have been requesting stories from it almost every night. At first my three year old complained about the lack of pictures (it really isn't "fully illustrated"), but she quickly got over that and enjoys listening to every story. Both of my older children like to compare these stories to ones they've seen on TV, or read in the few modernized fairy tale books we own (given to us by friends and relatives). Maybe my children are warped - which is very likely - but they prefer the original stories, with their not-so-happy, and often times violent, endings.
I've never been one to believe children need to have their reality padded... real life doesn't always end the way we hoped, so neither should stories. Hopefully this book, and ones like it, will be a bedtime favorite for years to come.
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