mirror ball 92: fairy tales

Is there a fairy tale that particularly captivated you when you were a child?

Or is there one that you find especially intriguing now, as an adult?

What is it about this tale that spoke or speaks to your imaginative spirit?

John M:

Not a fairy tale exactly, but one of my favorites as a little kid was the book "Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel," by Virginia Lee Burton, about Mike and his apparently female steam shovel, Mary Anne, who "could dig as much in a day as 100 men could dig in a week." 

The story is so wonderful.  Mike and Mary Ann have a great business, but the Depression puts them out of work and they are "very sad."until they get a job digging a foundation for a town hall where they dig so fast they forget to leave a way out, and end up living there with Mary Ann becoming the furnace and Mike the care taker in a very cozy scene at the end.  The art is so great, you feel the energy of the dig and then the panic and then the warm, wonderful, happy ending.

I always wanted to be the "Mike" at the end, sitting in my rocking chair with my pipe, reading the paper, with a smiling Mary Ann right there keeping me warm.

Wow!  I feel five years old again.

Thanks!

Steve:
I didn't realize it when I came up with this theme, but I don't actually have one fairy tale that I particularly loved. The more I've thought about it, the more I realize that fairy tales mostly seemed strange and uncaptivating to me as a child, and in a way still do. That is, the stories themselves didn't grab me, and I think it's because I rarely got a sense of how the characters felt about the bizarre situations they were in. In my memory, at least in the versions I read, children or princesses or princes went from situation to situation but I never got a sense of who they really were. Instead, I enjoyed stories like those in the Oz books, or the Wonderland/Looking Glass books, in which the girls were earnest or crabby or funny. 

That said, some of the settings in particular fairy tales were very interesting and evocative to me: the witch's candy house, Baba Yaga's hut on chicken legs, the goat's bridge with an ogre underneath it. I loved, and still do, to imagine a forest with enchanted things and creatures in it. And the notion of a castle with magical and mysterious rooms is still pretty thrilling to me.  

Valerie:

         Fairy Tales

         I read them all, every story that came my way. We had the Children's Bookhouse, a huge collection of stories - 15 volumes - one fairy tales, one nursery rhymes, one animal stories, one heroes - you get the idea. I returned time and time again to the ones no one else commented on much:
         The Little Match Girl
         The Steadfast Tin Soldier
         The Selfish Giant

         Now, I love Modern re-imaginings of some of those tales that still spin in my head:
         Cinder
         Scarlet
         The Goose Girl,

         and odd ones:
         The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales
         The Sisters Grimm
         Once Upon a Cool Motorcycle Dude

         So many I can't name them now - they are all spun together from hours spent on the living room floor, elbows raw on the carpet as I turned page after page, and

         hours spent bent to choose book after book from my library shelves to share with students seeking just the right
         story.