Shakespeare's Stories for Young Readers (Dover Children's Classics)

E. Nesbit has written many children's books. The one I'm most familiar with is The Railway Children. I really like that book and it influenced my decision to purchase this book. In the introduction of Shakespeare's Stories for Young Children, E. Nesbit explains her reasons for writing this book. She explains that her children love Shakespeare's story lines but at the time were too young to enjoy the actual play. So she took some of Shakespeare's most famous plays and summarized them, making it easier for children to understand. Shakespeare's influence is found everywhere and I wanted my children to be familiar with his plays. However Shakespeare didn't write for children and I know mine wouldn't understand the language and would be bored in a matter of pages. E. Nesbit did a great job explaining the stories. My children were able to comprehend the stories with little explanation. Each chapter is a different play and about six pages. She also includes direct quotes from the plays. It's the perfect introduction to Shakespeare for young children.

As readers can tell from the title of this review, I cannot recommend it enough.I bought this book for my eight year old who is very interested in Shakespeare but still years away from fully grasping his language. She loves the book and I love reading it aloud to her.SSfYR is presented in chapter book form without illustrations. Nesbit writes beautifully, always respecting the intelligence of her young audience, as well as the traditions behind subject matter she is conveying. Each tale gets its due, while yet being pared down to a digestible size for pre-adolescents. Her language is rich and lively, and her insights are inserted as charming asides that offer an adult's perspective without vering into didactic or moralistic homilies.If your pre-teen is bright, sensitive and looking for a good read, this is the book to buy!

The stories are watered down for kids, but nothing is added that shouldn't be there. It's a great way to get a child familiarized with the stories so they will be better able to understand what is going on when they do get to the full stories. It's not a vocabulary builder and in case you have objections about some things Romeo & Juliet still kill themselves and people die and get killed in the stories. They did not take away from the stories for the kids. It's very, very summarized. Still it's a good introduction for anyone who want's a quick way to know about the stories. Not all of them are there. I'm a bit disappointed some of my favorites were omitted.

My 10-year-old son was interested in Shakespeare so after reviews of this book, we decided to buy it as a read-before-bed book. I was surprised how very thin it was, but liked that the major works were in kid-sized portions. I though it was good to get a nice overview of each story, so that he would be familiar when he read the original version in it's entirety (much later).What I was disappointed with was some of the word choices - like referring to Romeo and Juliet as "lovers". I thought another word could be used that was more age-appropriate. This word came up several times. There were a few areas like that, that I would have done differently.One funny thing... after reading one of the tragedies, my son started asking "Is this next one a funny one or another tragedy?" He wasn't very happy with the stories with unhappy endings! "How could he write an ending like that?! That was a terrible ending!" I guess it opens the discussion that not all stories have happy endings....

This book has been perfect for my daughter who is learning delayed and has reading issues. Her high school class was reading the real Shakespeare plays, and there was no way she could do that. She has been reading this with her tutor and she has enjoyed it and she is also able to discuss Shakespeare to some degree with her age mates. Such a blessing!

My students loved the stories and found them somewhat easy to understand. I teach HS ESL so they have a little more difficulty understanding such complex stories but they did a pretty good job with these stories.

Over heard my 10yr old son on the phone gushing about Romeo and Juliet. He's told so many ppl he is a Shakespeare fan now! Stories are accurate and appropriate. Great introduction for children and reminder for adults!

At first I was not sure whether my 11-year old son would love the way the stories were presented. To my surprize, he kept asking for more and more once we finished the first one, and he had smiles throughout the reading that I did for him. Now he will be reading them himself as well. Great book!