Thursday’s Tale: Fairy Tale Fun Finds

by Carol4 Comments
No story today. Instead I thought I'd share some of the fairy tale goodies I've seen. From IKEA - Your child can have fun recreating the fairytale by rescuing the grandmother from the wolf’s belly, safe and sound.   Love this cross stitch pattern available at 123Stitch.com. Aren't these shadow puppets wonderful? Available on Amazon. I'm pretty sure I have something I could wear this necklace with. Available from Forzieri. Wonderful dice to encourage story-telling. Available on Amazon.   And if you're a sewer, the projects in this book look adorable. Available on Amazon. Thursday’s Tales is a weekly event here at Carol’s Notebook. Fairy tales, folktales, tall tales, even re-tellings, I love them all....
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Audiobook Review: Ten Lords A-Leaping by C. C. Benison

by Carol6 Comments
Title: Ten Lords A-Leaping (Father Christmas Mystery #3) Author: C. C. Benison Read by: Steve West and Jean Gilpin Category: Mystery Audio published: December 3, 2013 by Random House Audio Rating: 3 out of 5 stars Add: Goodreads Purchase: Audible | Amazon | Book Depository Although Father Tom Christmas serves his little church in enchanting Thornford Regis with a glad and faithful heart, he never expects to find himself skydiving to raise money for it. Nor, safely back on the ground, to see two of the other divers leap from the plane, then tangle in a midair punch-up and begin falling to the earth. To say that there is tension between the men in question—Oliver, the 7th Marquess of Morborne, and his brother-in-law Hector, the 10th Earl of Fairhaven—would be an understatement. But the trouble among this ancient landed family really began a generation ago, when a marquess divorced his first spouse to marry his brother’s wife, fathering in his two marriages a viper’s nest of arrogant young aristocrats....
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Audiobook Review: The Black Country by Alex Grecian

by Carol5 Comments
Title: The Black Country (Murder Squad #2) Author: Alex Grecian Read by: Toby Leonard Moore Category: Mystery Audio published: May 21, 2013 by Penguin Audio Rating: 3 out of 5 stars Add: Goodreads Purchase: Audible | Amazon | Book Depository The British Midlands. It's called the "Black Country" for a reason. Bad things happen there. When members of a prominent family disappear from a coal-mining village - and a human eyeball is discovered in a bird's nest - the local constable sends for help from Scotland Yard's new Murder Squad. Fresh off the grisly 1889 murders of The Yard, Inspector Walter Day and Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith respond, but they have no idea what they're about to get into. The villagers have intense, intertwined histories. Everybody bears a secret. Superstitions abound. And the village itself is slowly sinking into the mines beneath it. Not even the arrival of forensics pioneer Dr. Bernard Kingsley seems to help. In fact, the more the three of them investigate, the more they realize they may never...
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Thursday’s Tale: The Girl Sold with the Pears

by Carol2 Comments
We're visiting Italy today. "The Little Girl Sold with the Pears" is a fairy tale collected by Italo Calvino in Italian Folktales, published in 1954. You'll notice some familiar themes in the story. A man had to pay the king four baskets of pears each year, but one year he only had 3½ baskets to send, so he put his little girl in the bottom of the fourth basket and covered her up. She is eventually discovered by the King's kitchen staff. She is given the name Perina and she goes to work in the kitchen. Of course, she's beautiful and kind and smart and the prince falls in love with her. The other maids though become jealous and tell the King that Perina has boasted that she can steal the witches' treasure, and he sends her out to do so. Perina travels through the woods, spending the night in a pear tree. In the morning, a little old woman is standing...
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