Cinder-Bella: Bella At Midnight by Diane Stanley

Author Diane Stanley, noted for her earlier Rumpelstiltskin's Daughter, goes again to the well of the revisited fairy tale in her delightful revisionist Cinderella tale, Bella at Midnight.

Left motherless at birth, little Isabel is dismissed by her distant and distraught father and sent to a peasant nursemaid to be raised in the village of Castle Down. Little Bella, as she is called, grows up ignorant of her noble heritage, happy with her foster parents and big brother Will. Her best friend is the fourth-born son of the King, Prince Julian of Moranmoor, who also was wet-nursed and raised to the age of three with Bella's family. As the years pass the two children grow more fond of each other even as Julian moves on to become a page in the nearby castle of his uncle, Duke Gilbert.

But when Julian joins the other pages and young squires catcalling and flirting with pretty girls at a local fair, he is too embarrassed to greet Bella when she catches their eye, and she is heartbroken by his seeming indifference to her, believing that he is ashamed of her lowly status. Before he can explain, however, Julian is taken away as a truce hostage to the king's court in the neighboring kingdom of Brutanna. Bella, too, is suddenly taken from what she believes to be her family and reintroduced to her father's household, to his difficult new wife and her two new stepsisters. Stepsister Alice is still deep in silent grief for her merchant father, lost at sea, and stepsister Marianne is a pretty, social-climbing opportunist who wrangles a place as lady-in-waiting to the queen and finds peasant-raised Bella smelly and unworthy of notice. Berated and shunned in her father's lavish house, Bella sleeps in the kitchen by the fire and turns to the cook for affection.

But when Marianne's gossipy tale of the queen's squabble with her husband reveals that the king plans to launch a secret attack upon Brutanna which will endanger Julian's life, Bella travels to the Brutannian court. There, disguised as a fine lady in a white brocade dress and glass slippers, she attends a wedding feast and meets secretly with Prince Julian long enough to share the attack plan with him. Seeking to avert the battle and the renewal of the 100-year war between Moranmoor and Brutanna, Julian slips out of the castle and meets with the king of Moranmoor, who rejects his plea and draws his army into formation for combat.

Knowing that Julian will die if the battle begins, Bella settles upon a desperate plan. Disguising herself as the Worthy Knight, the prophesied peacemaker from God who comes to end the long war, by the light of the full moon she rides between the battle lines with a white banner of peace fashioned from her borrowed gown, and her ruse ends the battle before it begins.

That this Cinderella who rescues her prince also marries him is a foregone conclusion. Knighted Sir Isabel by Prince Julian, Isabel becomes his wife in the village church and everyone surely lives happily ever after. A bit of romance, a touch of magic, plenty of adventure, and a strong theme of loyalty, honesty, and honor make Bella at Midnight a novel that has something old and something new, something borrowed and something true to that royal wedding at its conclusion.

Bella at Midnight has appeared on the state children's choice award lists of Georgia, Texas, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, and is a 2008-2009 Tennessee State Book Award nominee for Grades 4-6.