Usborne Illustrated Stories of Princes and Princesses

In the fairytale world of princes and princesses, anything can happen. There are enchantments to break, glass hills to climb, giants to defeat and true love to find.

Much-loved classics and some rarer tales are brought together in this gorgeously illustrated collection.

Staff Review 

This collection of stories features some of the usual classic fairytales, such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and The Princess and The Pea. However it is the other lesser-known stories that are quite interesting. One example is The Grateful Prince, a story of how a king was tricked by a wizard into taking away his heir, but the king had a cunning plan to replace his son with a peasant's daughter. When the prince grew up, he vowed to rescue the girl who had been trapped for eighteen years with the wizard. Another example of a lesser-known fairytale is Rhodopsis and the Rose-red Slippers. This story bears a faint resemblance to Cinderella as it is also about a lowly servant girl who loses a slipper and the pharoah's son who looked for her to marry her. Of course one of the major differences is that the story takes place in Egypt.

A section at the end of the book has a very brief history of the tales in this collection and this is very useful for the young readers to understand that even if the stories inside are not of real people, they originated from real people's imaginations and may even come from different lands. As there are not too many illustrations and most are in single colour, this book is perhaps for slightly older readers, or at least for parents to introduce fairytales to their future readers.