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Topic: Traditional Tales

Recommended Fairy Tales and Traditional Stories for Children

This hand-picked list is a treasury of timeless stories passed down through generations, alongside more modern tales inspired by traditional stories and twisted fairy tales designed to entertain and amuse.

Many old favourites feature on this list, and young readers will love plotting their escape with Rapunzel, building a house with The Three Little Pigs or going to the ball with Cinderella. We’ve also picked some traditional tales from around the world, including BooksForTopics favourite Pattan’s Pumpkin, which is also one of our Recommended Reads for EYFS.

Alongside the traditional, this booklist features a number of fractured fairy tales that turn traditional stories on their head! There are hilarious twists on familiar stories, like Goldilocks and the Three Crocodiles and Cindergorilla, as well as tales told from new perspectives, like The Troll, The Pea and the Princess, and The Wolf’s Story: What Really Happened to Little Red Riding Hood.

For timeless tales and riotous retellings, look no further than our list of the best fairy tales and traditional stories for children!

Picturebook

An empowering retelling of Little Red Riding Hood about challenging the traditional narratives we are told, with a confident, autistic character at its heart.

Gina Kaminski is here to tell you three facts.

1 – Little Red Riding Hood is full of BIG mistakes.
2 – She is off to fairy tale land to fix them.
3 – She WILL save the wolf.

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Certainly not Gina as she takes the narrative lead and tells the story in her own distinctive way. With fantastic illustrations from Francis Martin, and an innovative use of pictorial emoji language, this is the ideal book to empower every child to be the hero of their own story. Fans of Little Red by Bethan Woollvin, Luna Loves Dance by Joseph Coelho and Fiona Lumbers and Look Up! by Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola will love Gina Kaminski Saves the Wolf.

Picturebook

A brilliant retelling of the well-loved classic The Three Billy Goats Gruff – with a hilarious twist!

I am a troll. I live to eat. I love the sound of hooves and feet and paws and claws on cobblestones. For that’s the sound of meat and bones!

What lives under the bridge? A terrifying troll who is always hungry!

And this troll loves to gobble up anyone who dares to cross the bridge, but his favourite of all is billy goat: goat rump in a honey glaze, curried goat and goat smeared on toast – you name it, this troll LOVES it!

So, when the three Billy Goats Gruff decide to clip clop clip clop across the bridge, the troll is already imagining all the scrumptious ways to fill his belly.

But what if the troll is about to underestimate those seemingly sweet goats… And bite off more than he can chew!

A story told with pitch perfect timing, pacing and hilarious detail with Barnett’s signature narrator voice, this is Billy Goats Gruff as never before!

Award-winning illustrator, Jon Klassen, brings the story to life with his stunning visuals

The first in an incredible new collection of fractured fairy tales crafted by one of today’s most celebrated and acclaimed author-illustrator duos.

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