This really wasn't worth my time or money despite being a discounted copy. Emma Fenney does a fine job reading it and employing some amusing tones and accents, but that can't improve on fundamentally boring material. There was a male voice at one point, but nowhere can I find whose voice that was, so I can't credit him. But the problem was with the stories which are not really that entertaining. Maybe kids would find more entertainment in them than I did.
The stories are as follows:
- The Emperor's New Clothes Everyone knows this story, so 'nuff said. I didn't find it entertaining.
- The Swineherd is about a prince who disguises himself as a farmhand to stalk a princess, and it turns out she'll sell kisses for baubles and trinkets. That relationship never went anywhere and the moral of the story is the king is a tyrant because rather than try and change this behavior he himself has no doubt inculcated in his daughter, he throws her out, and rather than try to redeem her, the prince abandons her. More like a nightmare than a fairytale!
- The Real Princess More commonly known as The Princess and the Pea this is another tale of spoiled brat royalty. Any princess who was so "sensitive" that she could feel a pea through several layers of bedding would be far too delicate to survive in the real world. This is just another example of how women, according to Andersen, ought to be delicate and subjugated, and put on pedestals and mattresses.
- The Shoes of Fortune also known as 'The Galoshes of Fortune', this story tells of magic shoes that can take the wearer to anywhere, any-when. This truly dickhead Councilor, Justice Knap, having argued that the Middle Ages were a better time, is transported there and takes forever to figure out what happened to him. What a maroon. Someone should have just kicked his dumb ass with the shoes.
- The Fir Tree essentially tells suffragettes they shouldn't whine about not having the vote because they might be worse off with it. It tells people of color they shouldn't agitate against slavery because life as a free person might be worse. It's dumb and ridiculous.
- The Snow Queen is the story of Satan's mirror - designed to reflect the worst in everyone. Taking the mirror up to heaven, an accident occurs and it shatters into gazillions of pieces, two of which enter the eye and heart of a boy who was nice, but soon starts being mean to the girl who's his neighbor. He's then abducted by the snow queen and apparently there's no law enforcement in this neighborhood.
- The Leap-Frog is another story about abusing women, wherein a flea, a grasshopper, and a Leap-frog, which I assume is simply a frog, compete to see who can jump highest, and the idiot king offers his daughter's hand (and presumably the rest of her body) to the winner of the contest even though not a one of the competitors is human. The frog wins. There's no word on if it changed into a prince when the princess kissed it.
- The Elderbush is about a boy who catches cold from getting his feet wet because that's how germs work, and when a suspicious old man inveigles his way into the child's bedroom, an elder bush sprouts from the teapot and the bush contains a woman. From there the story devolves into even more incoherence.
- The Bell is a bizarre and nonsensical story about children trying to learn the origin of a ghostly bell sound coming from beyond the woods near their village.
- The Old House is really about an old man, a young boy and a tin soldier. Very suspicious. And nonsensical.
- The Happy Family is about burdock and snails. I think. Hell, I have no idea.
- The Story of a Mother is about an irresponsible woman who chases after death when he takes her young child and when he offers to give it back she turns him down and lets death carry the child off to who knows where.
- The False Collar is about shaming a woman because she will not talk to an impertinent man. The man is disguised as a shirt collar, the woman as a garter, but the implications are clear: one is high up, the other low down.
- The Shadow is a story about how the lower classes ought to be executed if they try to rise above their station. I am not making this up.
- The Little Match Girl is about how a girl who froze to death from neglect is really better off dead.
- The Dream of Little Tuk is sheer nonsense from start to finish.
- The Naughty Boy is Cupid and this story is about how evil love is. Another story about an old man and a young child.
- The Red Shoes and for something completely different: another story about an old man and a young child. This essentially is a cross between the shoes of fortune and the swineherd. This spoiled-rotten girl gets red shoes and because she wears them to church she's cursed to dance forever in them. Eventually her heart bursts. It was only because she mutilated herself that she got let into heaven.
It seems that you've been living two lives, Mr Andersen. In one of these lives, you're Hans Christian Andersen, purported teller of tall tales; you have a social life, pay your taxes, and you help your landlady carry out her garbage. In the other life, you write disgusting stories of old men and young children. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not. That, Mr Andersen, is the sound of inevitability.
