Flower Fables (Penny Books) (Kindle Edition)

From Publishers Weekly

Written for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughter, Ellen, when Alcott was 16, and first published in 1855, these six prosy fairy tales were chosen from a 1992 collection, Louisa May Alcott’s Fairy Tales and Fantasy Stories, edited by Daniel Shealy; Shealy provides an informative afterword here. Readers meet a cast of elves, fairies, brownies and sprites with such Shakespearean names as Willy Wisp, Moonbeam and Thistledown, and the children who occasionally dally with them. Thinly disguised morality lessons told in an over-upholstered style, they instruct the audience in the importance of various virtues. In “The Frost King,” for example, elves resolve to conquer the ice-hearted ruler of winter through peaceable means (“Let us teach you how beautiful sunshine and love and happy work can make you”). More than a little dated, the stories grow tedious with lofty homilies (e.g., “little Annie dwelt like a sunbeam in her home, each day growing richer in the lo (more…)

Tagged with: Afterword • Books • Brownies • Daniel Shealy • Edition • Fables • Fairies • Fairy Tales • Flower • Flower Fables • Homilies • Kindle • Little Annie • Louisa May Alcott • Moonbeam • Penny • Penny Books • Prosy • Publishers Weekly • Ralph Waldo Emerson • Shakespearean Names • Sprites • Sunbeam • Thistledown • Virtues • Wisp

Filed under: Kindle Books

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