A World Full of Nature Stories - Angela McAllister - ★★★★★

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Author: Angela McAllister

Illustrator: Hannah Bess Ross
Genre: Story Collection, Nature, Children's Fiction
Rating: 5 stars.

What an outstanding collection this is!!! 😍 😍 😍 Full of imagination and rich with folklore.

The book contains 50 stories all themed around nature. But don’t assume that these would be the typical stories about trees and flowers and importance of greenery. On the contrary, the stories are quite varied and most of them contain at least some element of magic, which is not surprising considering that the stories are from folktales and legends. They are grouped together in terms of the element of nature they focus on. Thus we have sections named “Flowers, Fruit and Seed”, “Wind and Weather”, “Creatures Great and Small”, “Sun, Moon and Stars”, “Lake, River and Ocean”, and so on. Almost every single one of the stories was new to me, and all of them were excellent.

The tales come from all over the world. While many books make this claim, this book actually delivers on the promise. Every single human-populated continent (Sorry, Antarctica!) is represented in the book, and the countries are as varied as Estonia and Iraq, Peru and Korea. It’s so good to see such diverse countries represented in this anthology.

I have read only one other anthology by this author before ("A Bedtime Full of Stories") and that had surprised me by being so soothing on the soul. Now that this book matched up to the same high standards, I must say that I have turned into a huge fan of Angela McAllister and will try to grab everything she writes.

5 happy stars. Not to be read in one go but savoured slowly to maximise the impact.

My thanks to Quarto Publishing Group and NetGalley for the DRC of “A World Full of Nature Stories: 50 Folktales and Legends”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

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