Stories for Girls: Lovingly Adapted for Twenty-First Century Children [Broché]

Today, over a century and a quarter after his death, Hans Christian Andersen remains perhaps the world's most beloved author of children's stories. This talented Danish writer's tales have been translated into dozens of languages and have become the theme for major motion pictures.

This book contains the best stores in which a young girl or woman plays the key role. Among its fourteen tales are such classics as "The Little Mermaid," "Thumbelina," and "The Little Match Girl." Ever so gently, they teach growing girls the value of courage, imagination, humor, kindness, faith and love.

In adapting these stories for "twentieth-first century children," the editor has respected Andersen's wisdom about what children need and what they can understand. The sometimes stilted language of old translations has been replaced by more modern phrasing. But "adapted" doesn't mean the stories have been trivialized. Andersen's little mermaid remains as he created her, a courageous and complex young woman with much more on her mind than simply catching a rich husband.

Each story opens with a brief summary of its plot and an age rating. Keeping in mind that story time is often bed time, the longer stories have been broken into sections. For instance, "The Little Mermaid," which might take over an hour to read, is divided into four parts.

It was terribly cold and quickly growing dark on the last evening of the old year. The snow was coming down fast and covering everything in a thick white blanket. In the cold and dark, a poor little girl, with a bare head and naked feet, roamed the streets all alone.

She had been wearing a pair of slippers when she left home that morning. But they were of little use. They were too large, so large, in fact, that they belonged to her mother. The little girl had lost them running across a street to avoid two horse-drawn carriages that were racing along very fast and might have crushed her beneath their steel-covered wheels. Afterward, she could not find one of the slippers. A boy grabbed the other and ran away, saying that he would use it as a cradle when he had children of his own.

So the little girl went on in her naked feet, which soon turned red and blue from the cold. In an old apron that was much too big for her, she carried some matches. She had a bundle of them in her hands and had tried very hard that day to sell them to strangers on the street. But no one had bought a single match the whole day. No one had even given her a penny out of kindness. Shivering with cold and hunger, she crept along, ignored by all and unseen by most. The snowflakes fell on her long hair, which hung in curls down to her shoulders. Poor little child, she looked so miserable and so lonely.

Copyright 2001 Michael W. Perry, All Rights Reserved.