Thank you NetGalley and Aladdin's Cave Publishing for the chance to read and review this book.

I don't know if it's nostalgia or what, but this was a fun read. It's been a while since I've read the fables and it was nice to not have the message to explicitly given out in them (still pretty explicit though but that's just the nature of them.).

All in all, 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 where the former is not available.

I very much appreciate the attempt to take Aesop's tales back to their origins. The author notes that Aesop wanted people to think for themselves - true - and the various versions of these stories often took that "thinking" part away by adding all sorts of personal moral baggage. I found the attempt at poetry to be less successful - in places sentences are just hacked into different shapes, with rhythm and meter somewhat jerky or missing. Fundamentally, though, this is a good attempt at teaching original literature, and belongs in any classroom or supplemental education program.