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.

Beware of the Wolves: Into the Woods by Lyn Gardner

Lyn Gardner's Into the Woods could have been subtitled "Folklore's Greatest Hits." This far-ranging romp through the characters and plots of European fairy tales--Rapunzel, Goldilocks, The Pied Piper, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and others too numerous to list, shares a serious theme with Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (50th Anniversary Edition) trilogy, the lust for a magical token which promises power over all.

Aurora, Storm, and Any (short for Anything) are the daughters of Zella (short for Rapunzel) and Reggie Eden, vague nobility of some sort, both indolent and devoted only to their overwhelming romance. Their shabby estate is maintained through the domestic dedication of Aurora, who is happiest when rearranging the linen closet, while second daughter Storm, wild and dissatisfied within the manor walls, longs to roam the woods and have adventures. When Zella dies after the birth of the third daughter, Reggie tells the older sisters to care for the baby, whom he thoughtlessly suggests they name "Anything," and leaves to work out his grief and study architectural sites. Before she dies, however, Zella rouses herself to give Storm a small pipe, which she hints has sacred powers and urges her to protect it with her life.

Soon Storm and Aurora realize that the return of the Pied Piper, in the form of Dr. DeWilde and his packs of wolves, threaten their home and their lives, whereupon they flee "into the woods," where their adventures really begin. Starving and half-frozen, they stumble onto a gingerbread house with a contingent of extremely well fed, if not well nourished, orphans who are being fattened by the Witch Bumble Bee on a steady diet of sweets. Storm realizes that the children are being drugged and when little Any is taken away with a wagonload of chubby peers, Aurora and Storm suspect that they children are to be eaten by Dr. DeWilde or his wolves and set out to find her.

It's a wild and woolly chase through forests, over glaciers and mountains, down into flooded mines where Storm swims through a drowned shaft to locate Any at last, who is a slave laborer along with the girls' great-grandmother, the supposed ogre Mother Collops, dredging up gemstones inside the Piper's mountain. There Storm bargains for her sisters' lives with the enchanted pipe as the lure. Dr. DeWilde seizes the pipe, but Storm must leave her sisters behind.

Storm is daunted but not defeated, and when DeWilde arranges an elaborate wedding with Aurora on her sixteenth birthday, Storm uses her skill at pyrotechnics to arrange a flamboyant fireworks demonstration leading to the denouement of the evil DeWilde and the return of the enchanted pipe to Storm, who, now cognizant of its corrupting power, tosses it into the sea in the satisfying finale to the adventure.

Readers who love stories of plucky princesses and other girl heroes and are fans of fractured fairy tales will find Into the Woods as funny and fascinating as Ella Enchanted (Trophy Newbery) and as wild an adventure as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (The Wolves Chronicles). Mini Grey's witty, incidental illustrations sprinkled through the text never show the characters, but Gardner's characterizations of the three very different but very loyal sisters need no graphic boost. This is a wonderful addition to the growing sub-genre of the fractured fairy tale.