Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall by Bill Willingham

Snow White, acting as envoy for Fabletown, appeals to the Sultan of a far away land for help.  At first she is ignored, but then she is tricked to seeing him in his rooms.  It turns out that the Sultan holds a grudge against women.  He marries a woman every night, and then has her killed in the morning.  To make the Sultan want to keep her alive, Snow White tells him stories of how the different refugees came to Fabletown.

I LOVED this!  I like fairy tales, and I love reading twists on fairy tales.  We get to hear stories after the fairy tales we are familiar with have ended, but before they came to Fabletown.  We learn what happened to Snow White after she married her prince, what happened to Frog Prince after remarried his princess, what happened to the witch that got burnt by Hansel and Gretel, and so on.

For the most part, these stories were very dark.  These are not Disney fairy tales; they are much more in the flavor of Grimm fairy tales.  There's a lot of violence, cruelty and revenge.  I recommend this for older high school students, 10-12 grades.
 
I loved the illustrations.  There were eleven different illustrators for this volume, so each story that Snow White told had a different style of illustration.  In particular I liked the pictures in the first story, "The Fencing Lesson," which were done by John Bolton.  Beautiful, detailed, full color pictures. 

Anna reviewed the first couple volumes of Fables before, if you'd like to check that out.