The Twelve Dancing Princesses: A Folk Tale from the Brothers Grimm (Easy to Read Folktale)

A poor soldier uses an invisible cloak to follow the twelve princesses and determine how they each wear out a pair of dancing shoes every night

Grade 2-3 The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales (Pantheon, 1976) calls this ``The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces.'' The title of this new version may be an improvement, but the retelling is not. Part of a series of ``Easy-to-Read Folktales,'' it not only uses simplified vocabulary and sentence structure, but also introduces dialogue and some awkward language and unnecessary explanation. It also changes some content (e.g., making a gun a trumpet). Seltzer uses various art techniques and achieves some interesting effects, but the pictures often have a static and awkward quality. It is doubtful that any illustrations could rescue this text, and these certainly do not. Ronald A. Van De Voorde, Graduate Library School, University of Arizona, Tucson
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