Fairy Tales for Little Folks

K-Gr 2—Moses retells five fairy tales with his own style of casual narration and folk art illustrations. The basics of the stories will be familiar to children who have read "Little Red Riding Hood," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Snow White," "Puss in Boots," and "Beauty and the Beast," but Moses adds a bit of originality in the dialogue and in the characters' backgrounds. In Moses's version of the first story, readers learn it was Grandmother who made the red velvet riding coat and that the reason the tricky old wolf went to Grandmother's house was to eat the grandmother, the girl, and the pie and tea that Little Red Riding Hood was carrying in her basket. There are no happy endings for the villains in Moses's retellings. In "Puss in Boots," the ogre who transforms into a mouse is gobbled up by Puss, and in "Little Red Riding Hood," the woodcutter uses scissors to cut open the belly of the wolf. Several spot illustrations appear on the side of each page of the story, which are six to eight pages in length and adorn the end of the stories as double-page overviews of each plot and setting. Moses ends the book with a brilliant summary of why he believes it's important to read fairy tales to children.