4.20 avg rating — 1,551 ratings

"The tale of Sarah Jane, the middle of seven sisters, who goes to visit the 80-year-old “Aunt” Lillian, only to get caught up in the vendetta of some bee fairies."

3.89 avg rating — 764 ratings

"The prolific Jane Yolen has been called America’s Hans Christian Andersen, and with this book she hunts down great folktales from around the world and presents them for young readers."

4.33 avg rating — 45 ratings

"A gentleman named the Green Wind summons the 12-year-old September from Omaha to Fairyland, where she must retrieve a magical talisman, a witch’s spoon"

3.54 avg rating — 62,276 ratings

"Maguire takes on the Cinderella story from the point of view of one of the stepsisters,and recasts it as a sympathetic tale about a stepsister who loses everything and is forced to live with a new family. And it turns into a somewhat realistic historical novel about the complicated relationship between stepsisters."

3.71 avg rating — 1,229 ratings

"Warner covers the diversity and strangeness of fairy tales, as well as explaining how they came to be sanitized and bowdlerized for young audiences. And she looks at how the same stories crossed borders and cultures, changing themselves to adapt to new contexts while proving robust and unkillable"

3.60 avg rating — 9,864 ratings

"It’s a pretty simple story about a girl who reappears after having been missing for 20 years — and she seems not to have aged. We discover the dark underside of the fairy tale tropes about girls who go to live in fairyland, and see just how much Tara’s disappearance destroyed the lives of her family and loved ones. "

3.63 avg rating — 1,133 ratings

"Franz Xaver VonSchönwerth collected these stories in the 1800s, at the same time as the Grimm brothers were working on their own collections. And as Maria Tatar told us, “Schönwerth never refashioned his stories” to make them acceptable to mass audiences — leaving them just as intense as the original oral storytelling"

3.83 avg rating — 6,292 ratings

"This is the seminal work of Freudian analysis of fairy tales — Bettelheim digs into the underbelly of these tales and comes out with interpretations that seem startling and adult. (Note: Author is not a psychologist and is a generally terrible human being.)"

3.90 avg rating — 64,906 ratings

"Carter: "You see these fairy stories, these things that are sitting at the back of the nursery shelves? Actually, each one of them is a loaded gun.Each of them is a bomb. Watch: if you turn it right it will blow up.""

4.23 avg rating — 220,840 ratings

"Zipes: “The original edition was not published for children or general readers. Nor were these tales told primarily for children. It was only after the Grimms published two editions primarily for adults that they changed their attitude and decided to produce a shorter edition for middle-class families.”"