Legendary Fairy Tales

By June Seas

Experience this magical retelling of classic tales from around the world, including: Jack and the Beans, Hansel and Gretel, The Flower Fairy Prince and Princess, The Snow Child, and The Gingerbread Kid.

Chapters in each "book" offer loving attention to details of character, challenges of family relationship and the natural world of woodland and farming. Spellbinding voice and vocabulary will entertain growing children and grownups alike. This collection combines as a set the previously published Hungry Kids and Heart's Desire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carolingian Press
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215424018

June Seas

June Seas has lived many adventures, as a lawyer, teacher, children’s librarian, mother and godmother. You know her in her secret life as a writer.

Book preview

BOOK ONE- JACK AND THE BEANS: Chapter 1,  Jack

ONCE LONG AGO THERE was a boy about your age named Jack.  He lived with his mother and they lived all alone. I don’t know where his father was, perhaps he had never had one.

Jack and his mother lived in a very small wooden house in a very small town.  There was just one room down in the house and a loft above which was Jack’s room.  In the house the floor was made of dirt packed down hard and smooth.  There was a wooden table about the size of a little bed, and only one chair.  When Jack was small, he ate on his mother’s lap, but now that he was a great big boy, Jack sat in the chair for supper.  His mother fussed about the fireplace.  There wasn’t so much food for two people to eat at the same time, anyway.  Jack wondered when his mother did eat; she was thinner all the time, but he knew, (she said), she was just trying to keep her girlish figure.

There were only three houses in the town, and they were all more or less just like Jack’s house, except there was only an old woman in one of them and a family of silent adults and crying babies in the other.  The parents never spoke or looked at Jack.  The old woman just smoked.  They all shared a well.  All around this one-street town were miles and miles of fields and forests belonging to other people, whom one couldn’t see or know.  Once the old woman, smoking in her garden, had beckoned Jack, with one claw of a hand, to come over.  She never removed her pipe from her mouth, but asked him, Do you know who owns all this land? and threw an arm outward.  

No, ma’am, I am very sorry, I do not know.

Don’t know much, do ye?  It’s the big guy in the sky, and she waggled her eyebrows.   

Jack often looked up into the sky after that, but he saw nothing but fluffy clouds, sometimes white and pink, sometimes gray and blue.  Sometimes the clouds formed into animals or ships or castles, and looked just like you could visit there, through puffy doors into a place where the sun shone.   Jack had no toys, so he liked to imagine friends in the clouds.  

As you can tell, Jack and his mother were not rich people.  His mother never went shopping, so their clothes were mended and patched instead, with bits of cloth sacks, kitchen rags and old clothes too small and worn to be of any use other than patches.  (The other families appeared just the same, if Jack happened to see them in the garden.)  

In Jack’s house, there was a very old suit hanging on a nail on one wall.  The lining and pockets were snipped away and fashioned by his mother with a needle and thread, to keep their skin from showing through their clothes.  

Jack’s pants had shrunk short as he grew, and he (quite happily) went about barefoot most all the time. As a result his feet had grown very tough and he could scamper up a tree or over a fence as quick as you can snap your fingers.  His hands were tough too, because as soon as he was old enough, his mother taught him how to use a little axe to chop up wood for the fire.  He knew to be very careful and to use it only when mother was with him.

If they never went shopping, whatever did they eat?  I told you there was not a lot of food, but they had one dear, sweet cow they called Lulu-Belle, and she gave them milk every morning, from which Jack’s mother could make cheese and butter.  They had a little garden where Jack and his mother planted seeds, and picked the bugs off the leaves, and picked the vegetables which grew.  Some years there were not so many, and some years so much that Jack tired of eating mush with squash and milk, and then his mother had squash for dinner.  When there was a big harvest, they traded with their neighbors or at the market far from their town, vegetables for some flour for the bread Jack’s mother made, and then, Jack had cheese sandwiches.

Jack’s mother had taught him to forage for some wild weeds which could be cooked up into soup, though she told him never ever to pick mushrooms; those she found personally, because you really have to know which mushrooms are poisonous, and which taste good like meat in a stew.  

On a very rare day indeed, it would snow flour.  It was never cold anymore in their town for there to be real snow, so Jack could always wear short pants and bare feet; but oddly enough, every now and then a white dust would float down and Jack and his neighbors would set out pots to catch the flour.  If it hit any puddles, there would be a mess of glue until the next rain, but the white dusting, if you could catch enough, could be baked into bread.  

And Jack could always wander and find strawberries to eat and apples, cherries and peaches, fallen from neighbors’ orchards, and could chase away the birds to eat some berries from the brambles bordering their garden.  In fact, Jack was a little used to helping himself to food he found, when he was very hungry and had run barefoot a long way and found the fields and gardens of strangers.  Sometimes a farmer would shake his fist or even shoot off a BB gun, but Jack ran very fast and leaped home like one bad rabbit.

One day Jack slept a little late and when he climbed the ladder down to the kitchen, he found his mother covering her eyes and crying under the