What a beautiful collection of truly magical Christmas Stories, with stunning illustrations, perfect for bringing out the Christmas Spirit in anyone. This is still a great story and Dumas really did the original proud as he kept very true to Hoffmann's vision.

There were some scarier elements to it, such as the mouse king with seven heads, and the sinister story behind that too, so there are parts of this one that I actually preferred over the original. The positive aspect is that I got to visualise the imagination of the author a little better with this one, and I loved the story still. Perhaps I shouldn't have read it right after the original, but there were moments, like the story of the Crackatook Nut and Princess Pirlipata, where I was getting rather bored by the time that story within the story ended. I found at times, during this one, that a rehashing of the plot got a little bit tedious. While this is arguably better than the original because of the embellished writing and expansion of story and world, I have to admit, I kind of preferred the shorter original. The narrator then goes into just telling the original Nutcracker story, but adds a whole lot of detail to it. The story begins with a man telling a group of kids the story of the Nutcracker by Hoffmann, so it's not like Dumas is trying to claim the story as his own. He doesn't really take anything away from the original, but more so embellishes it and makes it longer, expanding quite a few things. This is literally just the original story but embellished by Dumas. Hoffmann, this time Alexandre Dumas takes to telling the tale. A stunning retelling of the original Nutcracker story by E.T.A.

Barnes and noble collectible editions