For part A my favorite stories were The Treasure and Wednesday.
All of the stories in the Russian Folktales unit were unique and often morbid. I hadn't heard most of them before and I really enjoyed reading them. I thought the Treasure story was interesting because it was so different and it really pushed the idea that helping others and being kind will reward you in the end. When everyone is refusing to help the poor man bury the old woman, but he persists in his attempts, he is rewarded with the money that he finds. It was so realistic how after he finds the money and becomes rich, everyone wanted to help him and be his friend. I thought it was interesting how the corrupt pope decides the best course of action steal the money is to dress up like the devil. But in the end he also got what he deserved.
The story of Wednesday reminded me of one of the stories I read a while back. I can't remember what unit it was in but the witch comes into the house and they ask for cakes from the woman and she can't get them to leave. Wednesday's story had the interesting twist that instead of just showing up, the woman accidentally summoned the bad spirit and let it in by not crossing herself before bed.
For part B my favorite stories were the story of Two Friends and The Headless Princess.
The story of the Two friends was just sort of bizarre and I'm not really sure what the moral to the story was. I thought at first that it was going to be that you always need to keep promises, because of the living friend going to the dead one to invite him to the wedding. But then the whole three hundred years of time passing while he drank with the dead friend kind of kept that from being a reasonable moral. Maybe don't trust dead people? Spend your time with the living? I don't know, but I did love the ending to this story how the living friend went to a priest three hundred years later and found out he had disapeared centuries ago. It was kind of meta and I thought it was an interesting ending.
The story of the Headless Princess was also very strange and unusual. The ending where they staked the princess into her coffin reminded me of the TV show Supernatural a lot. While they said the princess in this story was a witch or sorceress, she seemed much more powerful than many other young witches in stories. Also the fact that she took her head off to clean it and brush her hair was really creepy. While I'm glad the boy didn't get harmed the horrors the princess conjured, I would have liked to have known what happened if he had turned around and stopped reading. Would the circle have been broken? The horrors hurt or kill him? I thought this was a very unique story.
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