-This set offers a wonderful samlping of American regional folklore, which will be valuable to researchers, storytellers, older students with an interest in the subject, browsers, and teachers of all grade levels. —VOYA

-Following the practice, if not the explicit policy, of the America Folklore Society, Green organizes his anthology of folktales by geographical regions. The jokes, folktales, legends, myths, and personal experiences are designed to provide access to the range of narrative genres for educators, students, and researchers who require examples to illustrate these genres. For each narrative, he identifies the tradition bearer, literary source, date, original location, and national origin to the extent that they are known. The four volumes tramp from the northeast to the northwest, and there they hop aboard that old cyberspace to finish the trip. They are paged and referenced separately, but the cumulative index in each volume facilitates the comparison of variants in different regions. —Reference & Research Book News

-For each folktale, the title and tradition bearer are given, the source, the date, the original source and the national origin. An opening paragraph relates to such things as an explanation of the legend, a comment variant of Beauty and the Beast and motif. This has any number of applications in high school, from drama classes with students telling folktales to a comparison of the folktale to a study of geography matching the tale to reality. Also, comparisons of the different motifs in tales across Indian tribes could be discussed. High school librarians should tell their elementary counterparts about this reference, and offer to let them use it. —GALE Reference for Students