Reviews

Joseph Jacobs' Celtic, More Celtic, and European Folk and Fairy Tales, Batten by Joseph Jacobs

amythebookbat's review

4.0

OK, I started out with the Kindle version of this book and it said it was 146 pages, but if you look at the table of contents page, it had stories listed on page numbers well past that, which would equal the 316 pages. I decided to try listening to the audio version from Librivox while reading along since some of the Gaelic and Welsh words that popped up were difficult. The problem with Librivox, is that you often get multiple different readers and the audio quality varies greatly from reader to reader. That was certainly the case with this recording. There were a few excellent readers with clean recordings, some were ok readers that sounded like they were recording in an echo chamber, and some sounded like English was a second or third language so the reading was difficult for them to do and for me to listen to.
The stories themselves are interesting. A few had similarities to the Grimm's fairy tales that I grew up with. One was very similar to Cinderella, down to the ladies trying on the lost shoe cutting their feet to try to make the shoe fit. I thought that was interesting to find such similarities in stories from different countries. It makes me wonder if the Angles and Saxons maybe brought those stories to the Celtic people? Whatever the case, I liked the stories and that is what I based the stars on. If I would base the stars on the recording quality as well, it would probably be more like a 2.