Synopsis: Thirteen stories of mischief and magic, dinosaurs, a juggling dog, a snow baby, mystery and courage. In this extraordinary world of surreal lands and eccentric characters absolutely anything can happen...and usually does.

Review: These adventures follow the ‘once upon a time’ fairytale tradition, and hence, many have a ‘moral’ message or lesson behind them. Terry Jones is a clear, strong reader, but some stories are read very fast, so it can be hard to keep up with what is happening. A brief musical intro distinguishes each story from the nex t but the listener has hardly time to catch breath before Jones leaps into another adventure. However, each story is of adequate length, overall the recording is just over two hours long. Because these are fairytale stories, written with ‘stereotypical’ characters, of good and bad morality and cruelty or courage, they don’t work as well on audio book. Jones does a good job of using voices to add various tones to the characters speech but it would work best as hardcopy with illustrations. This is because there isn’t enough description; with such writing it is not necessary to do this as much because fairytale books have illustrations which enrich the text as much as the narrative. But without visual images and enough description it is more difficult to imagine the adventure playing in your mind. However, fans of fairytales may very well enjoy listening to the stories, and it would accompany Jones’s Fantastic Fiction book very well. Due to the moral messages it could be used as a classroom text when discussing fairytales.

2007-03-29