Kahran and Regis Bethencourt built their reputation as CreativeSoul Photography on couture-level portraits of Black children dressed as royalty and superheroes, and now, in this collection, as the heroes of classic fairy tales reimagined through African and African American folklore. CROWNED, their follow-up to the New York Times bestseller GLORY, gathers familiar stories, Snow White reworked as Asha the Little Cinder Girl, The Little Mermaid, Hansel and Gretel, alongside genuinely new tales built from African folklore, Anansi and the Three Trials, Aku the Sun Maker, and the legend of Princess Yennenga. It is a striking premise for a print book built around elaborate costume photography. As an audiobook running just over three hours, it raises a different, more complicated question: what happens to a project this visually driven once the photographs are gone.
Visual Ecstasy on the Page, Still a Story
The honest answer is that something real gets lost, and the reviews this edition has drawn make that unmistakable. One listener calls the print edition 'visual ecstasy', another describes holding onto her copy for weeks just to keep looking at the costumes and photography quality, and a third bought it specifically because a five-year-old granddaughter wanted to be the mermaid in a story where the character shares her name and, crucially, her likeness. None of that visual identification carries over into narration alone. The stories themselves, stripped of the imagery, still work as stories, but anyone coming to this format expecting the full CreativeSoul experience should recalibrate expectations before pressing play.
What does carry over intact is the curatorial ambition behind the collection. Reworking Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood alongside original African folklore in the same anthology is a genuine act of cultural placement, not just substitution, putting Anansi and John Henry in direct conversation with Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel rather than treating them as separate reading tracks. That structural choice is audible even without the photography, and it gives the collection real thematic coherence beyond just being a list of stories.
John Henry Adds a Third, American Thread
The choice to rename Snow White as Asha the Little Cinder Girl signals something more deliberate than a simple costume swap. Giving a reimagined character a new name rather than just recasting the same character in different visuals is a genuine act of narrative ownership, telling a version of this story that belongs to its new cultural context rather than borrowing a familiar shell. That same instinct shows up across the collection wherever a European classic gets reworked rather than simply reillustrated.
John Henry, the Steel Driving Man earns a specific mention because it complicates a simple binary reading of this collection as 'European tales plus African folklore.' John Henry is American folklore, born from post-Civil War railroad history, and its inclusion alongside genuinely African legends like the Princess Yennenga and genuinely European fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty gives CROWNED a third, distinctly American thread that broadens the collection considerably beyond a simple two-column structure.
This is a Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press, which is worth noting as a signal of genuine publishing investment rather than a self-published passion project stretched into audio. A major publisher backing a full-cast-adjacent narration for a specialty children's collection like this suggests real confidence in the material's commercial and cultural reach beyond a niche audience.
Several of the original folklore entries, Aku the Sun Maker and How the Zebra Got His Stripes among them, belong to the pourquoi-tale tradition, origin stories explaining a specific feature of the natural world, which sits comfortably alongside better-known European pourquoi tales listeners may already recognize from other collections. Placing African-origin explanatory folklore next to reworked European fairy tales in a single anthology gives young listeners a broader, more accurate sense of how many storytelling traditions actually share this exact narrative shape.
Graham and Bowman Earn 'Grand and Lively'
AudioFile's own assessment of the narration, quoted directly in the listing, calls Dion Graham and Mychal-Bella Bowman's performances 'grand and lively', and that description tracks with Graham's broader track record in this exact lane. He has built a substantial career narrating African American historical nonfiction and middle-grade fiction with warmth and genuine gravitas rather than exaggerated character voices, and a fairy tale collection built around cultural reimagining sits well within that established range even without a longer title-specific performance history to draw on beyond what AudioFile already confirms.
Three hours across a dozen-plus stories means each tale gets a compact, focused telling rather than a leisurely expansion, which suits a bedtime or car-ride listening pattern well. Families can dip into one or two stories a night rather than committing to a single long sitting, and the collection's built-in variety, mixing familiar fairy tale structure with fresh folklore, means repeat listens do not feel like retreading the exact same ground twice.
A 'Photography' Tag on an Audio-Only Product
The genre tag on this listing reads 'Photography', which is accurate to the print edition's core identity but genuinely disorienting for an audio-only product where the photography, by definition, is not present. Anyone browsing by that tag expecting a visual-heavy experience translated faithfully into sound should understand upfront that the audiobook is the storytelling half of a two-part physical and audio project, not a full substitute for the book itself.
This is best understood as a companion to the print or ebook edition rather than a total replacement for it, particularly for the age range likely most captivated by the actual imagery, roughly four to nine. Families who already own or plan to own the physical book will get more out of pairing both formats, playing the audio while a child pages through the actual photographs, than they will from the audiobook running solo.
The synopsis lists a dozen named stories and then trails off with 'and more', which suggests the collection runs a bit deeper than the marketing copy fully itemizes. Listeners drawn in by any single named story, the Anansi tales or the Princess Yennenga legend especially, should expect a genuinely full anthology experience rather than a slim sampler built around just the headline titles.
Bedtime Stories That Reflect Black Beauty Back
This is a strong pick for families wanting bedtime stories that reflect Black beauty and imagination back at young listeners directly, especially households already invested in GLORY or in CreativeSoul's broader photography work. It also works well for classrooms or libraries building out a more culturally expansive fairy tale shelf, where the folklore-forward original stories, Anansi, Aku the Sun Maker, the Princess Yennenga legend, add real range beyond the reworked European classics most collections default to.
Skip the audio-only version if the photography was the specific reason you were drawn to this project in the first place, that experience genuinely requires the physical book in hand, and no narration, however grand and lively, can substitute for it. For listeners who want the stories on their own terms, though, this collection earns its place next to any well-loved fairy tale anthology.
Key Details
- Performance: Dion Graham and Mychal-Bella Bowman deliver what AudioFile calls grand, lively performances across a dozen-plus reimagined tales.
- What it covers: Black beauty and imagination, African and African American folklore, fairy tales reworked through a new cultural lens.
- Feel: Warm and celebratory, even though the print edition's visuals do not carry into the audio format.
- Our call: A meaningful storytelling collection on its own, best enjoyed alongside the photography-driven print edition it was built from.
