There is no overall tone or mood to unify the ten brief folk tales included [in Winter Tales from Poland. And] it's hard to know what to make of the unfolksy opener, with its pointed putdown of people who are greedy or who distrust what is different, about a Polish poet-angel with clipped wings. In the same moral vein is "The Freak," about a "baby" who is born as an old man into an unheeding village that is soon destroyed by war—but there are also conventional fairy tales featuring riddles and tests of love, a stepmother who appears as a mare and a prince in disguise who marries the princess. The flimsiest tale concerns an incompetent witch who falls in love; the one about a tailor so skinny he can only eat spaghetti is both funnier and more fully treated in [Virginia] Haviland's Favorite Fairy Tales Told...