These are old stories, old as the hills, old as truth itself. Katharine Pyle gathered tales from across continents and retold them with the simple, direct charm of a mother speaking to children by firelight. Here you will find Sleeping Beauty pricked by a spindle and sleeping a hundred years, Jack climbing the beanstalk to face a giant, Cinderella sweeping ashes in her rags before the glass slipper finds her foot. But Pyle does not merely recite these tales. She breathes into them a particular warmth, a voice that recalls the unaffected earnestness of story-telling from days of long ago. These are not modernized fairy tales with irony or subversion. They are the fruits from the Tree of Wisdom, passed hand to hand across generations, and Pyle holds them out to new listeners with respect and love. The book captures something increasingly rare: the unselfconscious magic of stories told before cynicism entered the nursery. For readers who want the originals, the ones without gloss or agenda, told as they have always been told.
