Ellen Handler Spitz has a regular column on The New Republic website, where she has reviewed, among other volumes, Robie Harris’s It’s Perfectly Normal, Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter, and David Wiesner’s Three Pigs. This week she has a review of The Grimm Reader, and she manages to capture the poetry of fairy tales with incandescent prose.  I particularly liked her observations about how illustrations affect our reading of the tales.

The Grimm Reader also stimulates interpretation and improvisation by eschewing illustrations. In so doing, it provokes serious reflection on the function of pictures in children’s books. The dearth in this text makes us weigh their role as enhancers or detractors. Arguments against them of course claim that they tend to fix a particular visualization and tamp down what should be left loose and free. After being exposed, say, to Gustave Doré’s haunting engravings of Little Red Riding Hood, it would be hard to imagine those scenes any other way. Here, by contrast, words are given license to perform their sorcery unaided. Pages are decorated only occasionally with delicate borders, medallions, or illuminated letters. This pleases me immensely: in a culture determined to flood itself with garish, sensational imagery to the detriment of the unaided word, this book reminds us that, as Tatar herself has written, the words of children’s stories are magic wands in and of themselves.

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/the-storytellers