Week 13 Reading Diary: Europa's Fairy Tale Book

This week I chose to read Europa's Fairy Tale Book. I chose this unit because when  Joseph Jacobs compiled these stories, he mixed and matched elements to make them his own. That is what I am doing for my storybook project. So I wanted to see how someone else had done it.

In the story of The Cinder-Maid, I loved the incorporation of the bird and the little nuts with Cinder's dress and the carriage. It was clever of prince to put honey on the stairs to make Cinder's shoes stick.

I didn't see too many changes in Beauty and The Beast except that the story omitted the dying rose.

The beginning of the Language of Animals is clearly a version of Snow White with a male main character. I'm glad that Jack got to rub the future in his father's face without killing him. It was a just way to handle the situation.

The story of A Dozen at a Blow is pretty funny. This tailor kills twelve flies at once and convinces himself that this means he should go out and conquer the world. He does do pretty well for himself though. So maybe those flies were a good sign.

I liked the Earl of Cattenborough story very much. But I was confused as to how Miss Puss knew so much about pretending to be an earl.

In the story of The Swan Maiden, it is interesting to me that they lived happily together once they were married because the hunter essentially forced the swan maiden to marry him.

In A Visitor From Paradise, the husband starts off so smart and then loses all of that. "He who minds the door, minds the house. So we'll take the door with us, and then they can't get in." Close enough. At the end of the story, it said "It was and it was not." I'm not really sure what this means.

In the story, Inside Again, the part where the fox tries to confuse everyone about what truly happened reminded me of the humor in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The twist at the end was funny too.

I liked the ending of Johnnie and Grizzle where the witch tries to drink up the stream and bursts. That was creative.

I really wasn't familiar with the traditional story of Thumbkin, but this one was quite unusual. Thumbkin is doing so well and then he gets tricked so many times.