The Tales of Beedle the Bard - J. K. Rowling

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is a spin of book from the Harry Potter Series. The book gets mentioned in the 6th and 7th books in the Harry Potter series. We learn that it is a collect of short stories which wizard parent tell their children when they are growing up, in a way it is their equivalent of our fairy tales. As a result of its popularity J K Rowling decided to make the book with the stories in for us all to read.

The book is fairly small and has a light blue cover which has a darker blue pattern over, it has a aged look to it. The back cover it also the same and has a few short paragraphs about the book. Inside there are 5 short stories which are as follows:-

1- The Wizard and the Hopping Pot
2 - The Fountain of Fair Fortune
3 - The Warlock’s Hairy Heart
4 - Babbity Rabbit and her cackling Stump
5 - The Tale of the Three Brothers

I do not feel the need to give plot details about each of the stories as they are only short and I feel any information I give to the plot really will give the stories away and spoil them for those who have not read them yet. What I will tell you is that each of the stories features both magical and non magical characters and there are a lot of lessons which we can learn from them. I found the characters in each of the stories very easy to understand and the addition of notes by Professor Albus Dumbledore at the end of each story was very informative. He manages to give us his spin on what he thinks the messages the stories are trying to tell us are and how he thinks these have changed over the years. I like how he tries to tell us the myths and what truths there are behind each of the stories and this for me made them all seem slightly more believable.

Now I know this book is completely mythical as it comes from the made up series of Harry Potter books but for me I found that this was a lovely book and really did make the world of Potter seem slightly more real. The book was very easy to read and I loved how it was laid out. The stories were accompanies by small pictures which showed some of the characters and these were actually done by J K Rowling herself. They helped make the characters and places more easy to visualise. I also enjoyed the way Rowling made the character of Dumbledore come more to life as she filled pages with notes he was supposed to have made on these stories. I loved the inclusion of descriptions for words which we may not be familiar with and think this is a good way to explain it to us.

The whole book was a joy and fun to read as I know it is aimed at children but for me I loved it and especially the whole lay out. The small details which included decorations at the corners of the pages just made this book seem more cared for and loved when being made and written.

At the end of the book we have a short section which has been written by Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne MEP which tells us about the work she does for the Children’s High Level Group. She explains to us how the charity is helping the deprived children across Europe and how in buying this book we will be making a contribution to the charities work. I think this is a lovely idea and agree in supporting the charity which I did in buying the book.

The retail price on the back cover of this book is £6.99 and I do feel that this is very expensive for the short book. Bearing in mind that it is helping a charity I feel no more than £5 should be paid. I was very fortunate with my copy as I spotted it in Tesco’s in their sale racks and paid the bargain price of 50p!

Overall I am going to recommend this book to all fans of the Harry Potter series as it just seems to make the whole wizard world and certain characters seem more real. I also think it would be a good read for children who are into wizards and magic. Taking all into consideration then if you do have a copy then I think the reading the stories and ignoring the notes by Professor Dumbledore may be fun for bedtime reading to children. Now I just have to wait for film 7 to see if the actual book in the film is going to look like the copy I have!