I chose this version for its fidelity to the original story, to accompany a little wooden puppet brought back from Italy. Neither look like the plump rather sanitised Disney version and so help to set the story back in the time of "long ago" make believe. It's very well paced, set out in little chapters, with just enough text to hold the attention of a child learning to listen for detail as well as look at the pictures. My grandson, who is a few months into school, listened all the way through when I read it, then played it again on the CD, improvising with his puppet, and requested it several times again over the weekend before it went back home with him, so I judged it very successful from his point of view as well as mine! My one reservation is the frank use of the term 'murderers' to refer to the fox and the cat, which I think is unnecessarily scary; I would have preferred to use some vague term (eg 'baddies') more on a child's level, but there's not much point in contradicting the CD version. Might need explaining cautiously to a 5-year-old.