I am still going through my April reads backlog, but this was one that I wanted to share. I was reading this when I was feeling quite vulnerable in the middle of the night with a fever/cold: there was something so comforting and peaceful about these stories. Intelligent and dark, but written with warmth and humour, Wilde carried me away from my sickbed.
I didn’t even really realise at first that this was meant as a children’s book, that these were fairytales, because the richness of Wilde’s prose and the deep messages of the stories just made them seem like they were pulled out of time.
These tales deal with friendship, deception, and true to Wilde, aesthetics. What does it mean to sacrifice yourself? How do you honour that sacrifice?
Dark messages and fear lurk right under the surface, very much in the style of Grimm, but there’s also some stunning biting humour, as in the story about the pompous firework.
These bedtime stories were published by Wilde as a collection for children in 1888, and I can see why these stories have continued to be so popular.
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