The Gavin Bishop Treasury: 10 Favourite Fairy Stories and Original Tales

The cover, the end pages and every page in this book are gloriously illustrated and invite inspection. This large book contains five of Gavin Bishop’s original stories and five traditional fairy tales. Some of the stories are mostly pictorial with only a short sentence to accompany each picture and others have several paragraphs on a page, so they could be used for a variety of age groups and different reading abilities. Because of its size and large illustrations, this book would work well for a class read aloud.

The original stories have similar themes to the fairy tales but tend to be less gruesome. If reading to young or sensitive children, some of the traditional tales might need a little censoring as they tend to follow the original Grimm and Andersen versions. All the birds, apart from Chicken Little herself, are beheaded in Chicken Little. Two of the pig brothers are eaten and the wolf boiled alive and eaten by the last remaining pig, unlike some kinder versions of The Three Little Pigs, where the pigs and the wolf escape. The illustration of the troll in The Three Billy-goats Gruff is the scariest I have seen. Despite the violence, some children will love the moralistic punishments meted out, and the beautiful book is worthy of a place in a school or home library.