Almost Aesop

A book review of "The Tales of Beedle the Bard" by J.K. Rowling

I am surprised by how well the fairy tales of this book stand on their own, not just as small bits in the massive Harry Potter universe. I was expecting a lot of inside jokes and lore pertaining to the world of the boy with the lightning scar but each story made a satisfactory fable all by itself. Since no one other than Dumbledore himself writes the analysis of each fable, all the Potter trivia is still in the book, just not in the stories. This construct works amazingly well with the only hiccup being the forward, where the author has the annoying habit of writing as if she and her charity live in the world of Harry Potter and converse with the characters. Fortunately this small error, like the typo of an unmatched parenthesis on p. 85, are easy to overlook and I only found myself hoping that the book could continue beyond the far too brief hundred pages.