Laird Stevens

The New Blue Fairy Book Laird Stevens

This book contains six of the eighteen fairy tales from Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book (1889). The stories have been rewritten sentence by sentence to make them accessible to 21st century American children. The 6 stories in this book include Little Red Riding Hood, The Master Maid, The Goose-girl, Prince Hyacinth and the Adorable Princess, The Girl with Saffron Hair, and Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. The great beauty of Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book, originally published in 1889, is that it brought together many different fairy tale traditions. There are stories written by Charles Perrault and Mme d'Aulnoy, collected by the Grimm brothers and Asbjornsen and Moe, and translated from the Arabian Nights. It is a very rich collection of fairy tales. However, the stories are written in a language that is outdated and in places inaccessible to modern American children (and even their parents). To remedy this problem, I have thoroughly edited half of the stories contained in Lang`s book, keeping the stories as intact as possible, while revising every sentence so the stories can once again be read with pleasure by children.