Every child should sometimes read Grimm's Fairy Tales. My children love them. They are delightfully dark and twisty, and surprising to children who believe they know the stories. While beautiful story books should be shared with younger children, I love the complete Grimm's tales for older children who are ready for something a little more "grim!" ( )

All I can say is, if you think you know these old folk tales, you really want to read them again in their original forms. ( )

It's good but extremely repetitive. I don't remember most of the stories because so many of them reuse the same setup. ( )

In the early 1800's, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected German folklore and published it as Children's and Household tales, claiming that the stories were purely German in origin and that they had not been modified by the brothers. Due to complaints of inappropriate (sexual) content for children, the stories underwent several bowdlerizations and modifications by Wilhelm Grimm. This collection is an anonymous translation of one of the later (more child-friendly) editions. This is a long book of folklore, and should not be read by someone who's simply interested in reading some familiar fairy tales. Such people will find this book repetitive and tedious. Those people should probably read one of the shorter books that only has the "best" tales. This book would be interesting to people who are interested in the folklore more than the fairy tales.

Personal Note
In my attempt to complete these tales by a certain date, I overwhelmed my senses to the point that I was actually dreaming in the narrative style of Jacob Grimm. And I don't mean I had fairy tale dreams...I had the usual dreams, they were actually NARRATED in the terse, matter-of-fact style of Grimm's fairy tales. For anyone interested, there's a recent New Yorker article on the Grimm Brothers: The Lure of the Fairy Tale.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/07/23/120723crbo_books_acocella

I've made comments on it, and on the introduction to the Barnes and Noble edition of the tales, on my blog:

http://rachelreadingnthinking.blogspot.com/2012/07/grimms-fairy-tales.html ( )

I must have been the only person who didn't realize that many of Disney's stories were straight from the Grimm brothers. I found many of the stories contained throughout the book to be similar. Three brothers, princesses, people turned into animals, after a while everything blended together. After you've read the first five stories you can just stop, because everything else is very repetitious. ( )