Afro-American Folktales (The Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library)

Rating:
Summary: Not really for children
Review: The collection is a set of tales that is most interesting in the context in which they were told. These were developed in an age and a culture in which storytelling played an important role in maintaining the cultural lineage of the teller and listeners, aheritage at risk as the members of the society were torn from family and sold into servitude, often never to be seen again. It should be no suprise that these tales deal with adult subject matter, such as sex, enslavement, brutality and death. If I were you I would read these tales before blithely passing them on to your pre-teen. Then again, children deal with such heavy material everyday wehen they watch TV, maybe reading about it in a historical context would be a benefit.