Twelve Gifts of Birth Book

While looking for a digital copy of the The Witch's Catalog I came upon a website that not only had that but a list of other New Age-focused books. As such I looked over these other suggested reads in the hopes of finding some other books that may end up interesting me and with that resolve I came upon this book. Unfortunately due to the amount of pages this particular telling was just a poem lifted from the pages.

With that in mind I chose to find the actual book to see how the illustrations would be since I was hoping to avoid this bit of an anemic read. And in a sense I am quite glad that I did. There were parts of the book where the illustrations had the bright color and magical atmosphere of a child's fairy tale book while in other aspects explaining the gifts the illustrations were black-and-white stock pictures with some color added to emphasis the gift. It was a strange combination but one that I rather enjoyed for this telling.

The book itself started off with a bit of a fairy tale introduction in which the story implies the presentation of royal children with gifts from twelve fairy godmothers or wise women such as those found in the story of Sleeping Beauty. These women reached the conclusion that all human children, no matter the ranking they were born to, were deserving of these birth gifts. As a result, though, they would hope that eventually future children would be able to get these gifts just as their noble peers were allowed to receive them at the present time.

From there the story goes into the numbering and naming of each present, which is then followed by a longer sentence that gives instruction for using that gift. This presentation is similar to the one found again in the prior fairy tale although the actual gifts from one to the other definitely don't match. For those that are mentioned, though, I have to say I rather enjoy the new listing as these gifts are a lot more practical to the human race.

All in all it is a charming book and one that I would recommend at least as a one time read. Although it combines a bit of mainstream religion with New Age it doesn't detract from either group while giving children and adults a chance to think of the values that should be passed onto the next generation.