I was ENTHRALLED.. by the art. This is the type of book perfect for the coffee table to enjoy the strange and oddly beautiful sculptures within, but also pass a little time with each short fairy tale.

I really enjoyed the art in this book. I will have to read Grimm's fairytales and then revisit this book for a more complete viewpoint.

The sculptures are amazing, but the snippets of stories that accompany them are short and make it feel disjointed. I think if the book layout had been sculpture on the left page and story snippet on the right rather than vice versa, I may have enjoyed it more.

Disturbing, playful, fascinating little sculptures. Shaun Tan is masterful at making the beautiful profoundly unsettling. Great gift for the slightly creepy people in your life.

Fabulous book - I love the Brothers Grimm and Tan has used them as inspiration to make the most wonderful pieces of art. Beautiful and haunting.

Found this in the YA section after catching a glimpse of the cover. I loved the premise of using sculpture to tell a story. Grimm's fairy tales are some of my favorites, and I was intrigued. While I enjoyed the brief history provided in the foreward by Neil Gaiman (I mean, Neil Gaiman!), I wanted more from the all too brief reinterpretations of the fairy tales themselves. For someone picking up the book with no knowledge of any of the stories, the words would not tell the tale. Even knowing some of the stories, the prose didn't capture the essence for me. The art, however, certainly did retell the stories in a new way for me. It wasn't until I got to the end that I found synopses of the stories - this would have made my reading experience much more enjoyable and refreshed my memory along the way. All in all, a very interesting and quick read.

I want to own just about all of the sculptures pictured in this book. They are beautiful, frightening, and intriguing, much like the condensed or excerpted stories Tan has drawn inspiration from. My only quibble is that occasionally I wished for a whole story illustrated by a series of sculptures instead of a snapshot of a single moment from these classic tales.

Only read about a third of the book cause it was annoying only reading bits of the stories. But thw artwork was beautiful.

LOVE

I love Shaun Tan's art and storytelling abilities. His original work is genius, and here, as he creates sculptures to illustrated some of the Grimm's Fairy Tales, I think he achieves the desire of any artist who is referencing another work as inspiration. He makes the audience have a greater understanding of the source work, and also creates a desire in the audience to seek out the source work and revisit it.