I can’t really have a definitive opinion on Pullman’s ‘Grimm Tales’. It is a collection of fifty fairy tales compiled by the Brothers Grimm from the well known Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood to the likes of The Brave Little Tailor or The Cat and the Fat. They often had moral lessons and similar tropes, so in some areas were repetitive and also frequently made little sense, just pausing as I read and thinking ‘what on earth…’ I assumed that the ‘Grimm Tales’ were much more violent renditions of the tales told to children today, whereas to my surprise in most cases the violent realities weren’t far from what is now told and many weren’t actually brutal at all, though there are many notable instances of mutilation, eye-gorging and incest in some. In the nature of Fairy Tales, majority of characters were stock characters, Princes and Princesses, Wise Women and Witches, and this did get repetitive but I can’t really criticise Fairy Tales for using stock characters. Every princess was however “the most beautiful woman in all the land” somehow though, and I still can’t understand what it meant by the frequently repeated phrase that “each of his daughters more beautiful than all the rest” as it is impossible for each of the 12 princesses to be more beautiful than the other 11. Descriptions are limited and where they exist  also the same, something is always “as white as snow and as red as blood”.  Whilst the repetitions and use of stock can’t be used as a criticism, I did get annoyed by ‘beauty’ often being the only defining factor, and the lack of individual agency in majority of the female figures. My favourite tales were ‘The Moon’, a short fable explaining why the moon goes through phases, and ‘The Musicians of Bremen’ about a Donkey, Cat, Dog and Cockerel in search of work as musicians which was a wholesome little story. If I were judging the book on its characters, writing style or plot like the large majority of books, it wouldn’t score well however in the nature of the collection being a translation of the fairy tales that have be prevalent in everyones childhood, I can only justify a neutral rating, for I cannot penalise the elements that make the stories ‘fairy tales’.