Jack and the Beanstalk AND Little Red Riding Hood by Ed Bryan

I love fairy tales and little kids love fairy tales. When I read them out loud to my students, even the kindergarteners seem to instinctively know the stories and want to hear them again and again. However, there are a lot of fairy tale books out there and they are not all created equal. For a connoisseur of fairy tales, it's a challenge to get the illustrations and retelling just right. And then there is the audience. While I would read Paul O. Zelinsky's Caldecott winning Rapunzel out loud to third graders, I wouldn't read it to first graders. The beautiful, painterly illustrations would be lost on them, as would the pace of the storytelling. Creating a fairy tale for very young audiences that maintains the integrity of the original without watering down the story too much is a fine balance. Ed Bryan and his quartet of fairy tales published by Nosy Crow , a independent British publisher of children's books that is also an imprint of the superlative Candlewick