Hansel and Gretel - Children’s interactive Storybook HD Review

Hansel and Gretel - Children’s interactive Storybook HD is an interactive storybook app for iPad in which the characters can be moved around the page as well as tapped for sounds and movements when the story is either read out loud or read to oneself.

This storybook app is interesting in the way that one can move the characters as well as many other objects around the page as this story is being told. Parents, please note that this is a traditional, although abridged version of the classic Grimm's fairytale. In this telling of the story, the stepmother is especially evil towards the children, manipulating their father into leaving them in the woods, and when they return home the first time, locking them away in their room as punishment before they are sent deeper into the woods to be lost. Tap the stepmother and her interactions include waving her finger and yelling incoherently and angrily, sometimes directly at the children. Although true to the original tale, I find this delivery heavy-handed, especially for pre-schoolers. Personally, I am ok with exposing my son to the idea of a witch who eats children, but the idea that parents would be willing to leave their children in a forest to starve to death because of a lack food is not something I am looking to worry my son about, so we prefer another version that is true to the story from the gingerbread house on, but which greatly downplays the beginning.

The illustrations are simple, as are the interactions, but the ability to move the characters and other elements around the page may be of interest to children, assuming parents feel that they are ready to experience such a grim version of this Grimm’s fairy tale.