100 books like Twelve Dancing Princesses

This is hilarious, interactive board book is great fun to read with babies and toddlers. I love dancing to all the wacky rhymes with my grandkids - it’s a really good workout! When the farmyard animals start stomping and do-si-do-ing, the whole family will want to join in and dance along. Great for little ones who are just starting to tap their toes and twirl. 

Peppa is an adorable little pink pig, and the Peppa Pig books are full of family fun and laughter. In this 8x8 storybook, slightly older children will delight in Peppa’s very first ballet lesson as she learns some graceful dance steps with all her friends. When Peppa comes home and decides to teach her parents how to do ballet she gets quite a surprise! Wonderful humor and colorful, lively illustrations contribute to all the dancing fun.

The Fancy Nancy books are hugely popular, and this is a great addition to the series. Nancy loves to dress up and dance, and in this story she sets out to show her favorite ballet moves to her father, with touchingly humorous results. Young readers will enjoy following along as Nancy demonstrates her best plies, pirouettes, and jetes, and will probably be inspired to start their own ballet lessons!

An entertaining way to learn basic ballet positions, and a special treat for devoted little ballet students and their families.

A storybook that takes me back to my own dancing childhood. The fabulous mother-daughter team of Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton have created a delightful series of picture books with a very winsome protagonist, Gerry, who loves being a fairy princess - and what little girl doesn’t? In this charming story Gerry is given the part of a court jester in the ballet recital - definitely not her first choice!  Little dancers will be inspired by Gerry’s determination and undaunted enthusiasm, and cheer her on as she saves the day. 

In the middle of the night, when I reach for a book to avoid a midnight worry-fest, I love to read fairy tales. The Grimms' Fairy Tales are wonderful because they are very short, and there is a huge variety of stories in these collections. I don't want to read for hours, I just want to read enough to go back to sleep and have some wonderful dreams. Now, many of the Grimms fairy tales are violent and deal with extreme situations, but for me, this is like cartoon violence—they make me think, sometimes they make me laugh, but they don't usually scare me. Also, these fairy tales have a lot of symbolism, transformations, and magic, and you will come across the original folk tales that have been re-told in a much flatter way by Disney, and it's always good to go to the source! Make sure to get one… show more.

I started reading pretty early and the Complete Fairy Tales has been one of my favorites ever since I was a little girl. This book has definitely led to widening my imagination and helped me write my own stories even when I was as little as 8. Many of my writings are inspired by different fairy tales, and this book is definitely one of those. 

These stories run deep in my blood! I remember my Mum reading "Cinderella," "Hansel and Gretel," "Rapunzel," and "Snow White," to name a few, and being totally enthralled, captivated, and scared all at once.

Reading this edition as an adult evokes the same feelings, but I also experienced a sense of wonder and intrigue as I read the lesser-known stories such as "The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers," "The Girl with No Hands," "The Nixie of the Millpond," and "Hans-my-Hedgehog." 

I loved discovering these stories, closer to the originally published ones in their first collection, Children's and Household Tales in 1812, as they are much darker and scarier in nature than modern versions, and reading what Philip Pullman says about each one is an unexpected delight!

This crucial book was originally published by Putnam’s, New York, in 1941. 

Riess admitted in his autobiography (which exists only in German) that the book was largely a compilation of material from various sources, much of it handed to him personally by Robert Vansittart, the head of British Intelligence at the time. Large portions of the book were in fact written by Heinrich Pfeifer, and supplied to British Intelligence, part of it on Pfeifer’s two trips to London, and part passed across via Vansittart’s agent Walker in Lucerne.

Riess was a Jewish refugee from Germany who was trusted by Vansittart to aid him in helping to persuade the American public to enter the War against Germany. The book is one of the most astonishing books of its kind ever written, full of breathtaking revelations. It deserves to be widely known and to be a classic text for historical studies.

Its… show more.

Even those of us who are familiar with historical details of the Holocaust have a mostly generalized understanding of the fraught relationships between US-based Jews and Jews in Europe.

Bonelli uses primary source materials, mainly letters, to inform a very well-crafted narrative in service of educating American Jews about the travails of European Jewry and helps explain the older generation of Jews to an often-befuddled younger generation.

Wilhelm II, the last German emperor, has always been a subject of fascination to me. Often portrayed as a caricature of the archetypical Prussian and blamed single-handedly for the outbreak of the First World War, the man behind the historical figure has remained an enigma. Very little has been written about him in Germany itself. Christopher Clark, who is perhaps better known for his seminal work The Sleepwalkers and his excellent biography of Prussia, Iron Kingdom, has done a great job tackling this delicate subject. Neither tied down by the weight of German memory culture nor by the constraints of academic writing, Clark’s biography of Kaiser Wilhelm is readable, informative and well-balanced. I would highly recommend it to anyone who seeks to understand Germany before and during the First World War.