Love stories

If your child groans at the word, it is worth knowing what is actually on this shelf.

• Family love. Grandmother, six minutes, about the stories an old woman carries.
• Love that sees past appearances. Beauty and the Beast, eight minutes, from Perrault’s line of tales.
• Love that gives everything away. The Happy Prince, five minutes, adapted from Oscar Wilde.
• Love that lets go. The Little Mermaid, four minutes, retold from Hans Christian Andersen.
• Love that has to be earned back. East of the Sun and West of the Moon, eleven minutes, from Norway.
• Learning to feel at all. The Light Princess, six minutes, adapted from George MacDonald.

Two stories here do not end happily, and both are worth reading anyway, at the right age and not at the very last minute of the evening.

The Little Match Girl, six minutes, is the harder of the two. The Little Mermaid in its original shape asks a child to accept that loving someone can mean losing them.

If your child is upset afterwards

Do not explain it away. Say that the story is sad, that you feel it too, and then stay for a minute. A child who is allowed to be sad about a story learns that feelings pass, which is more useful than being protected from all of them.

Choose one where the plot is doing the work. The Frog Prince, nine minutes, is mostly a bargain and an argument. East of the Sun and West of the Moon is a quest with a polar bear in it, and the love arrives late.

It also helps to say nothing about the theme before you start. The word love on the cover puts children off a story they would otherwise enjoy, and by the end they will not have noticed. For an older listener, stories for big kids holds the longer versions of most of these.

Love stories, more than any other kind, become the one a child wants repeated until you can recite it. That is not a problem. Repetition is how a young child gets underneath a story, and the fiftieth reading is doing something the first could not, as reading the same story every night explains.

If you need a change without a fight, move sideways rather than away: Kindness has the same warmth in shorter form, and Friendship, the parent theme this page sits under, keeps the relationships and drops the intensity. Mothers is the narrowest of the lot, at ten stories.

Four of the best in this theme run nine minutes or more, which puts them out of reach on a school night and makes them ideal for a Friday.

Where to start if you have the time

The Enchanted Pig, nine minutes, is a proper old-shaped tale of a promise, a mistake and a long effort to put it right. Tamlane, ten minutes, comes from the Scottish ballad tradition and is the most atmospheric thing here. Giauna the Beautiful runs nine.

Shorter, and better for a first attempt at this length, is The Goose Girl at seven minutes, written for ages six to ten. It is about loyalty being recognised eventually, which is a thing children are very invested in.

If nine minutes is already your limit, take them in two halves rather than dropping them. All four break cleanly in the middle, and a love story is one of the few kinds where stopping overnight adds something: a child spends the next day deciding how it ought to end, and is usually disappointed to find the author disagreed.