Adventures from the Land of Stories: The Mother Goose Diaries and Queen Red Riding Hood's Guide to Royalty

Parents need to know that Adventures from the Land of Stories, first released as a boxed set in 2015, includes two short books supposedly written by characters in Chris Colfer's Land of Stories series. Readers who don't know this particular version of Red Riding Hood and Mother Goose from the series are going to be really confused almost at once. In the course of delivering her multi-century, multi-world backstory, the hard-drinking, hard-gambling Mother Goose romps through history, from having romances with Leonardo da Vinci and Henry VIII to giving really bad advice to Marie Antoinette, finishing with a march in a marriage-equality parade. In a bizarre interlude, Mother Goose distracts a bunch of kids dying of the Black Plague by reciting nursery rhymes. (They die anyway, but she finds her calling.) By contrast, the Red Riding Hood book, "written" by the most over-the-top, self-absorbed character in the series, is often hysterically funny as Red instructs her fans on the fine points of ruling (e.g., "Peasants Are Like Pets"), with mangled advice from Machiavelli to Hamlet. In the series, she's romantically involved with the Frog Prince, so here she offers a tale of how her subjects objected to interspecies romance, and what she did about it.