TEENY-TINY AND THE WITCH-WOMAN

Though the youngest, Teeny-Tiny is also the wariest, for when Big-One and in-the-Middle venture into the forbidden woods and accept a meal and a bed from the coaxing, cackling old witch woman in the little house, it is Teeny-Tiny who suspects her all along, who notes that her little white fence is made out of bones, and who engineers the brothers' escape with the help of ""Aunty's"" three magic objects. The tale is smartly told, with satisfactorily spooky incidentals, but the fact that the mother in this Turkish ""Hansel and Gretel"" warns the children not to go into the woods (instead of treacherously luring them there) and welcomes them home with open arms in the end eliminates the most disturbing terrors of the Grimm story. Some might consider this a plus, but Foreman--whose ""Aunty"" is a pickle-faced witch from the nightmare gallery and whose bare trees with too human faces shriek and reach insistently but with none of the chilling resonance of, say, Rackham's more subtly menacing forests--makes it even less a sounding of the unconscious and more like Disney's gratuitously grotesque Snow White.