Cinderella by Jacob Grimm
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Part of BBC’s “100 Stories that shaped the World” list, I thought it would be fun to keep track of all the works I have read that are listed.
In the summer of 2009 I took a classic children’s literature course, probably the worst course I have ever taken in university. My prof was in charge for both the online version of this course and the in-class version, so in true nature of her lazy personality she used the twice-weekly lecture time, which I had to suffer through, to tell us about her amazing life and her amazing husband, who does all the chores for her so that she could sit on her butt and read all day, thinking because she has such a life everyone else has as well and demanding we read a 500-page novel in week. Furthermore, instead of using the lecture time to discuss important themes in the evolution of children’s literature, she would go through the course website’s table of contents and point out that all she wants to talk about is actually all online and we can read it at home, wasting over an hour twice weekly of her student’s time. To say the least, I was thoroughly annoyed at ever having paid money for such nonsense.
Anyway, one of the stories we were expected to read was Cinderella. Up until that point I had only ever watched Disney’s version and was quite shocked at the differences between the two. Looking back I can truthfully say that I appreciate the written story much more for its greater storytelling and depth of meaning.
Overall, I feel this story is a must for anyone, who grew up watching the Disney versions of classic children’s fairy tales.
