Review of "The Little Match Girl," by Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by Rachel Isadora

 Review of

The Little Match Girl, by Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by Rachel Isadora ISBN 0399213368

Five out of five stars

One of the saddest fairy tales

 If you closely read the fairy tales of northern Europe, many of them have very dark tones that are often downplayed or even excised from the original. This story is one of the saddest. The title character is a very poor young girl forced by her father to go out into the cold streets and sell matches.

 It is snowing heavily, and she loses her shoes early in the day. She is cold and hungry and did not sell a single match that day. She was afraid to go home because her father would beat her for not bringing home so much as a single penny. Therefore, she huddles tight into a corner.

 To get some warmth, she lights one of her matches and for a moment she experiences heat and light. Of course, being but a mere match, it soon burns out. She strikes a new one and experiences a vision of plentiful, warm food in front of her. This continues with her striking her matches and having visions where good things are happening to her.

 The next morning, she is found huddled into a corner and frozen to death. There is an attempt to make that process appear to be a positive thing, but nothing can change the reality that she was a poor, neglected little girl that died because there was no one on Earth to care about her. That should be what the reader derives from this story. It is a tale that was all too real a few centuries ago.