New Zealand children's author and professional storyteller Tanya Robyn Batt gathers folktales and poems about fairies in this lovely collection from Barefoot Books, illustrated by English artist Gail Newey. Poems (and quotations from longer poems, songs and plays) by Robert M. Bird, Francis James Child, Thomas Hood, William Shakespeare and William Allingham are interspersed with four traditional folktales, each introduced by Batt in a two-page discussion of whichever fairy theme they exemplify. Selections include:

The Magic Cooking Pot, a Scottish folktale in which an old couple possess and then lose a fairy-blessed cooking pot that never runs out of food, when the old man fails to thank the fairies properly. It falls to the old woman to steal back the pot, fleeing from the fairies and their hounds, and aided in her escape by the pot itself.

The Fairies and the Cake Baker, another Scottish tale, in which a clever baker named Margaret, kidnapped by the fairies because they wish her to bake them her delicious cakes, manages to free herself from captivity through her understanding of her captors distaste for noise. Generous at heart however, she bakes that cake for the fairies, once freed.

Only Me, an English folktale in which a disobedient young girl, never willing to go to bed when her mother tells her to do so, has a night of play with a fairy child, only to be terribly frightened when her playmate is injured, and the fairy's mother arrives.

Leprechaun Gold, an Irish tale in which a farmer thinks he has come into great fortune, when he captures a leprechaun and forces that little being to reveal the location of his treasure. Little does the farmer know that the leprechaun is more cunning than he...

Originally published in 2002 as A Child's Book of Faeries, and then again in 2008 as The Barefoot Books of Faeries, this is the second collection of folk and fairytale that I have read from Batt, following upon her excellent The Fabrics of Fairytale: Stories Spun from Far and Wide. While that collection has a thematic focus on fabric and clothing, the focus here is on fairies, and stories about them. I enjoyed reading the selections here, I appreciated the accompanying watercolor artwork from Newey, and came away with a few new reading ideas. Recommended to young folklore enthusiasts, and to anyone interested in fairy lore. ( )