Nathaniel Hawthorne's Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales intend to modernize renditions of Greek legends to the Christian child's taste and understanding. Personally, I think he failed. His retellings stripped the myths of their original meanings and morals in an attempt to "clean them up" and make them suitable for "civilized society." I think what bothered me most was his narrator's interjections, which often stamped out the imaginative properties of these myths by rendering fantastical creatures as a child's misunderstandings of antics retold by a relative. I felt the retellings mocked and insulted the ancient Greek culture without actually retelling or modernizing the myths at all.