Shaun Tan is a remarkable and versatile artist-storyteller. His tales are usually modern and conveyed in drawings/paintings, but here he turns to the classic fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and renders them in small sculptures inspired by Inuit art. These sculptures don’t merely illustrate the stories; they ARE the stories, with each tale summed up in a single, perfect visual image.Each sculpture is shown in a carefully composed photograph, with the sculpture isolated against a dark background. The photographs are all full-page and in color. Facing each photo is a page containing the name of the tale and a striking quotation from Tan’s retelling of it, amounting to no more than about 10 lines of fairly large type. The quotation and the sculpture together encapsulate the heart of the tale.For those who don’t remember the Grimm stories from their own childhoods, an “annotated index” at the end of the book provides a one-paragraph summary of the plot of each story. Rounding out the book is a foreword by Neil Gaiman and an afterword by Tan, the latter describing his inspiration and the materials he used.This book would be a perfect gift for anyone, child or adult, who enjoys fantasy and art and would like to see a fresh take on this familiar but archetypal material.