This is a cut&paste of a review which should appear soon on Amazon Kindle.

The Dog And Its Dead Owner    Tanya G. Guleria

Fables re-written into stanza rhyme, 21 of them.

three stars

This is an unusual work and is aimed at an unusual audience. If you are in that audience, your appreciation may be greater than mine. So as always, do not let my star count override your judgement of content. More on the stars, counting, and my rating challenges later.

You will read poems, in rhyming quatrains, containing old stories.

The opening fable, The Lion and the Mouse, is nicely retold. Again in The Fox and the Grapes, with a slightly new moral at the end.

I do not claim to have recognized all of the stories. For example, A Story of Friendship – which has a nice moral.

Spoiler alert: The Tree and the Rock has this ending: “If love is real, /Not just fascination, /It’s not a deal /It is a donation.”

I’m quite sure the version here of The Princess and the Frog is not the one I remember. Again, Guleria has provided an unexpected conclusion.

The book says it is fables for adults. I think it is a nice way to introduce a child to a fable, perhaps reading one at bedtime. Your approach to this work may be different from mine.

Back to my star count boilerplate. My personal guidelines, when doing an ‘official’ KBR review, are as follows: five stars means, roughly equal to best in genre. Rarely given. Four stars means, extremely good. Three stars means, definitely recommendable. I am a tough reviewer. I try hard to be consistent. On literary merit, three stars seems right and is a definite recommendation. If you’re interested in catching up on some fables, your personal rating may well be higher.

Kindle Book Review Team member.

(Note: this reviewer received a free copy of this book for an independent review. He is not associated with the author or Amazon.)