Wizard of Oz

Kae posted this in the comments part of the last blog entry, so I thought I'd repost it here so it'd be more visible ...


Wizard of Oz
I first want to mention that I only saw the movie and I thought the book was written after the movie. I like the much gentler side of this fairy tale as Baum mentions in the introduction "It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-ache and nightmares are left out". I have not finished the book, but so far this holds true. I like how Baum goes into detail about how the scarecrow doesn't have a brain, and the tin man doesn't have a heart and the lions lack of courage. Baum does a great job describing the colorful land which is quite the opposite of the gray farm in Kansas.this has all the ingredients of a good fairy tale for children. As I said before I haven't finished the book but I know the ending and Dorothy will return home much wiser.
February 26, 2007 9:14 PM

Alice in Wonderland (1st half)

okay, i don't really have much to say except that this is probably one of the weirdest books i have ever read. i've always that that "alice in wonderland" is something great like she's in some kind of perfect world with nothing strange happening, but i was wrong. i find that it's not just weird, but it is strange as well. the characters in the book are also strange. i understand that it is a fantasy novel, but the characters being used are not my kind of characters. even alice herself is strange especially how she doesn't remember anything. it seems as if she remembers the characters, but she just doesn't remember what is actaully going on in her own life. like i said earlier, i don't have much to say about this except that it is strange, and i'm hoping that i will enjoy reading it more towards the end and i'm not doubting that nothing strange is gonna happen.

Yolen ch 11-16

So I want to start by saying that I love this book. The first day I sat down to read and was suppose to stop on chapter 10 I kept reading till ch 16. I like how Gemma's story of Sleeping Beauty is different from the original that I know. I think there is alot of symbolisim behind Gemma's story, some things that will be reviled later. Magda, the translator is a good guide and helps to evolve the story by giving her view point of living in Poland and living there after the war. I'm not sure that this is a "children's Book" but I like it. It is a book about how when she was a child listened to her Grandma tell her the same story and how it was a large part of her childhood. My question is what will change by her finding out who her Gemma really was?

blog # 2

OK so before i begin let me first apologize for posting this blog later then the specified time, i did not see the schedule on line and did not know that i was the lead blogger. anyways after reading the Hansel and Gretel variants this week i noticed a few things. first of all i realized the Hansel and Gretel and molly whuppie were similar stories, because they both seemed to have one character who out smarted the " evil" character and ended up saving the others. in Hansel and Gretel this character was Hansel, he came up with many different ways to save his sister, and in molly whuppie, molly was the clever character who saved all of her sisters and in the end she was rewarded for everything that she did. also the juniper tree and the rose tree were obviously similar. another common theme throughout out all four of these was that the children were all mistreated by their step- mothers. this came as a surprise because when you first think of the relationship between a mother and child you think of love, even though these stories spoke about step-mothers, this helped to shine a different light onto the fathers relationship with his children though, which i really happened to like. another thing i realized while reading these was that they were not like the stories i read as a child. in fact most of the variants we have read have been scary and violent. i sometimes wonder if that is why Zipes claims that children's literature does not exist?