The Oxford Nursery Treasury

 By Ian Beck

A generic book of Nursery Rhymes!  We've been looking for something for a while, but it's hard to know if something is good or not without seeing it first hand, so I'm going through whatever the library chooses to stock.


 The rhymes are some of the better ones taken from the full Oxford Book.  The accompanying pictures aren't bad, either.

But there are stories as well, and the stories are dreadful.  The tortoise and the hare, for instance, have a bet involving vegetables and they write the hare to be particularly odious so that you can feel particularly great about him losing to the tortoise.  I spent the entirety of "The Princess and the Pea" hoping that the two 12 year old royals didn't end up married at the end (of course, they do), and my daughter didn't care much for the story either; she cut in at the end to ask the only really important question, "DID THEY EAT THE PEAS!?!?"

It was reading this book that made me realize that I really hate most fairy tales.  I can't stand the popular ones, at least.  But I know that if I start in on things like "The Tinder Box" we'll be dealing with nightmares for weeks.  It's a real dilemma.