Chinese Fairy Tales and Legends: A Gift Edition of 73 Enchanting Chinese Folk Stories and Fairy Tales

Im in love with the book. As a bilingual, I found it tremendously interesting to read the fairy tales I knew since little in another language. Its very obvious that the translator has put a lot of works into this book since I found the most popular fairy tales in here. Plus, there is short explaination at the beginning of each story for those who are not familiar with the culture which I myself aldo found very helpful.Would recommend if you wanna know a bit more about Chines folktale!

I am having a great time reading these stories to my children. Great stories in a beautifully hard bound book. Perfect for history and mythology lovers who want to know more about the Eastern traditions.

A really beautiful cover to this book. This book made a nice, unique gift for a nine year old who loves books and legends, and also happens to love learning Chinese language and family culture in her grade school. Who doesn't love books? This is a really nice, enjoyable book on Chinese fairy tales and legends, and is good for that extra time at home.

The kind of book that makes you want more in a series. Very educational.

Haven't read it but cover is beautiful good font size.

Beautiful book and a great starter book for someone just getting into Chinese folklore.

Lovely edition

Initial Review:This is an initial review. I read through the first couple of stories and immediately discovered glaring issues. The stories read like they have been heavily abridged. Stories are incomplete and worse, they FEEL incomplete. It is not a subtle transition. There are narrative jumps in the stories which prevent a reader from fully immersing into these stories which can only happen when parts of the stories are inelegantly edited out. I can understand that there has to be a lot of "squeeze" when one is trying to put 73 stories into one tiny book, but there should be some sort of warning or explanation of the abridgment or "translation." I would rather just have several stories less, but have full-complete stories rather than just abbreviated stories with portions glaringly cut out.I happen to know of several stories in their entirety and these are simply pale shadows of them. Like an abbreviated introduction that you read to know what a movie is about when you are browsing them online.I see a lot of 5 star reviews of people "gifting" these books to other people, and rating purely on the physical presentation of this volume. However, it feels like these people have not actually read the book. Even if they have, it is unreasonable to expect that they know the full stories, as this book does not tell you that these stories have been manipulated, and where to even find the original stories in their entirety. As such, this book fails on so many levels. This book may have been edited so they could be read to 10 year olds, as a lot of 2,000+ year old stories are just not "politically correct" nor do they follow any modern day trends. Unfortunately, these stories are represented as the "fairy tales and legends" of a whole culture of people. A lot of it is lost when a person outside the culture decides to haphazardly edit portions of a story that they (whoever this person is - whatever their values are) decide to "fit" these stories into their own cultural values. The problem is, it is ANOTHER culture. It is NOT meant to fit into another culture. It is what it is, and it should be regarded as beautiful in its original form - without edit. Politically correct or not, it is disingenuous to conform a whole culturally specific set of stories so they may fit nicely into what the editor (in whatever culture they are raised in) deem is "right" or "wrong." This, in itself is obviously ridiculous.As I personally dislike abridgment without notice or censorship without proper notice, I would deduct full stars for this. -5 stars out of 5.On top of that, the abridgment and censorship was not even done elegantly and glaringly obvious. Stories are jumpy and hard to read. But not so disjointed that they cannot be read at all. -3 stars out of 5.I further suspect that the editing/abridgment was to fit some sort of recent narrative or trend - which simply does not work with stories which could be 2,600 years old. As I dislike being told how I should feel when reading a book, or being unable to formulate my own educated opinions simply because information is not being presented in its entirety due to a passing trend, I would further deduct - 5 stars out of 5.So, to buy or not to buy? Strangely, I would still say - "buy" - but with the understanding that these are highly imperfect stories. But where else would you be able to get so many stories under one cover? It is hard to find another work which gathers so many stories under one cover (which I think is what this volume is cashing out on) short of majoring in East Asian Studies in a college somewhere. For the interested dabbler, this is "fine" as an introduction to the existence of these stories, but these are no way representative of the actual stories. I can see it being significantly toned down and targeted at younger readers.Finally, a note: When a person delves deeper into the Asian cultures, a person will discover, especially with the Chinese, that there are simply so many variations of the same story. Each story changes a bit as you move throughout China. There is no one set "standard" of these stories in China (though they are working hard on setting it these days). Just like "Mandarin." To the regular non-Chinese person, "Mandarin" is the national language of China. But to ANY Chinese person, they understand that "Mandarin" is only the "official" language - used to communicate throughout China. What does this mean? Most Chinese have their own special dialects that other Chinese people (outside of that local area) cannot understand - (e.g. "Cantonese"). When a Chinese person reads a written document, they can easily tell if it is not a "local" person due to grammatical habits. With this in mind, how much more pale then, the translations?So, yes. I dislike this book. But, I'm also appreciative of the efforts put in to get this book out to the public.I buy these items with my own pennies. Please click on that helpful icon if I was helpful. I definitely wasn't trying to be a Negative Nicky, but I was definitely hoping for something more comprehensive.Thank you for reading this far!

el libro es precioso. No puedo esperar a leerlo

Ótimo livro. RecomendoRobledo

Great read

El libro está bien presentado y acabado

Nice to read whenever I have time