I bought this book to continue teaching little Japanese children (4-7) partly brought up in the states classic western children stories, but then realised that the stories had all been shortened- some to a point they were not understandable. I thought a lot of the messages the original writers were trying to portray were lost, and the children found the pictures scary. There were a lot of stories I had not heard of, and very few of the ones I would have called classics.I just want to warn that the pictures are fairly dark and gloomy and that the stories have been adapted and shortened a lot in some cases. Most stories only have one picture of a single scene and are very heavy on words, whereas children tend to find it much easier to follow if there are more pictures.