Tenggren's Golden Tales from the Arabian Nights

by Margaret Soifer, Irwin Shapiro, Gustaf Tenggren (Illustrator)

A beautifully rendered collection, featuring retellings of Scheherazade, include "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp," "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," and "A Thousand and One Nights," and is accompanied by the legend of how they came to be told.

Genres: Childrens, Magic, Adventure, Picture Books, Monsters, Cultural, Literature

128 pages, Library Binding

First published January 1, 1957

Reviews

[Teresa]

Read to the kids and talked about these famous stories. Even better that the book was mine from when I was a kid!

[Sorento62]

I had this as a child. The tales were exotic, fascinating, sometimes scary or puzzling. Fabulous illustrations!

[D]

This is a great introduction to The Arabian Nights for children.

[Jan Priddy]

I loved this book as a child, and I still do. The stories are close to classical, expurgated translations without virginity issues or racism. (The classics have stories of unfaithful wives who always seem to take up with Black servants when their husbands are out of the home.) I had forgotten that Ali Baba's brother was cut into quarters and his body hung—grim detail, how did I miss that? Morgiana's wisdom remains clear—and one of my favorite illustrations is the one with her dancing with daggers just before plunging on into the heart of the head thief! People died in these stories and I was not traumatized. As a child I was not disturbed by the huge noses of only the villains illustrations or that one character turns black, but the illustration changes him back again though that is not included in the text. All the women illustrated are lovely and slender and identical and mostly interchangeable. I did not mind that when I was a child either. I loved the stylized horses and the exotic illustrations (which take after Edmund Dulac's much earlier work), and I loved the stories themselves despite occasional elements many today would not find appropriate for young children. These stories are not all included in the longer unexpurgated collection I read recently. Single volumes of these stories are never close to complete. I really do need to find Burton's complete 10-volume set and wade through.

All this to say, my five stars represent my childhood memory and my personal nostalgia.

[Artemis]

Tales from The Arabian Nights✨🌛📖
Golden Tales From the Arabian Nights
Each page is decorated with images, this is the most artistically active story book of the tales from the Arabian Nights that I’ve personally encountered.
It seems to have very larger writing which helps children learn how to read and attracts young readers because of the larger font. I found the illustrations very stunning and I’ve spent quite some time studying them. See for yourself

[Lauren Fee]

My kids really enjoyed this book of tales! The illustrations are fabulous and engaged all of them equally. They were also a delight to read aloud. We all feel ready for more, so from our family's experience, I think this book serves as a great scaffold to Arabian Nights.

[Mike Daly]

These stories just don't hold up.

[Mary]

Holy violent! These and the Grimm stories are so macabre.

[Chelsea]

Read it to my 3.5 and 5.5 year olds. They enjoyed the stories and illustrations. I appreciated that the selections were curated for children without rewriting them to be overly simplistic.

[Lillian]

great illustrations

[Lindsay Luke]

Kids book with 11 stories from the Arabian Nights. Another one I never read as a kid. It turns out the Aladdin takes place in China! Who knew? The illustrations are great and the stories should be understandable for kids. People don't follow instructions and bad things happen to them, plenty of people meet unfortunate ends, but the heroes of the stories all survive.

[Matt Saunders]

Beautiful illustrations, and a nice retelling of the tales from the Arabian Nights that strikes a nice balance between completeness and readability for kids.

It includes all the important plot points from the stories, while dropping some of the cultural references that could be confusing for modern audiences. For example, it omits the way the captain of the thieves aroused suspicion by refusing to eat salt at Ali Baba's house.

It does include some of the violent parts, such as how Ali Baba's brother was cut into quarters by the thieves and later sewn back together to conceal the manner of his death. So be aware of that if you're reading it to younger children.

[Ann Waterman]

Illustrations are lush and stories are well told.

[Lisa Wuertz]

A great kid-friendly version.

[Donna]

My fav tome as a sensitive six year old.