First half of Reading Week 3 Reading Diary: Brothers Grimm (Ashliman)-Extra

The first part of the Brothers Grimm (Ashliman) collection by D.L. Ashliman, had a lot going on. I really liked that so many animals were involved and often times were the main narrators of the stories! In the Cat and Mouse Story it was clever how the author chose to name the supposed grandchildren the cat was going to baptize after how much of the fat he had eaten. For example, two of the “grandchildren” were named Top-Off and Half-Gone. I thought it might be fun to write a story from the mouse’s point of view in the cat’s stomach! Many of the Brothers Grimm stories involve characters being eaten alive. I may have my storytelling assignment combine both The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids and Little Red Cap because they both involve a wolf eating people, but then getting caught and cut open to save the victims. It would be interesting to have the wolf claim he learned his lesson but then go on his way and eat the grandmother and Red Cap to combine the two! I also had a wow moment while I was reading The Seven Ravens. I had a vivid mental picture of the girl cutting off her finger to use it to get into the glass mountain to save her brothers. I wasn’t expecting her to cut off her entire finger! Lastly, I thought that the last few stories in the collection all had a deeper meanings behind them. Many of the stories had the lesson “what goes around comes around” in them which I thought was cool that they all kind of built off of each other.

(Rumpelstiltskin illustration by Walter Crane

Source: UnTextbook)