________________ CM . . . . Volume XXIV Number 8. . . October 27, 2017

cover

Cinderella and the Furry Slippers.

Davide Call. Illustrated by Raphaelle Barbanègre.
Toronto, ON: Tundra, 2017.
32 pp., hc. & epub, $21.99 (hc.).
ISBN 978-1-101-91898-2 (hc.), ISBN 978-1-101-91899-9 (epub).

Preschool-grade 2 / Ages 3-7.

Review by Tamara Opar.

*** /4

   

excerpt:

Cinderella dreamed that one day an awesome prince on a white horse would come to save her. But no prince ever came; only more dishes to wash, floors to clean and hair to do.

The day of the annual prince’s ball arrived. Cinderella wanted to go, but she didn’t have a dress to wear. So she secretly called a fairy godmother to make an appointment.

When the fairy godmother arrived, she wasn’t quite what Cinderella had expected.

 

Poor Cinderella! She experiences one disappointment after another until she decides to take matters into her own hands; or, to reflect the theme of the story, she empowers herself.

     Cinderella and the Furry Slippers, a fractured fairy tale, introduces the traditional telling of Cinderella who, without ever complaining, serves her nasty stepmother and spoiled stepsisters hand and foot. But soon the reader realizes that perhaps this story will follow another path. Cinderella daydreams about magazine photographs of the handsome prince, beautiful gowns and the promise of living happily ever after. These serial stories are not very different from what real girls read about in magazines such as CosmoGirl and Seventeen which sell dreams of popularity and blemish free skin. Cinderella wakes up to fact that perhaps she has been sold an illusion when she contacts the fairy godmother from an ad in her magazine. The fairy godmother is not at all what Cinderella had envisioned. Cinderella becomes more and more disenchanted as everything from her frilly dress and fur slippers to the turnip coach turn out to be not at all what she had imagined for her entrance to the prince’s ball. Yet our heroine does manage to attract the dull prince’s attention when her shoe flies from her foot during her strange dance and wakes him from his nap. He is not at all what was pictured in the glossy pages of the magazine, and Cinderella makes a run for it. She runs right into a “girl’s only job fair” which holds the promise of Cinderella’s achieving goals greater than attracting the attention of a listless prince. The message is empowering for young girls as the job fair offers many opportunities for growth and achievement. The magic in this story is about a young girl who breaks away from the norm and chooses her own path.

     The illustrations in Cinderella and the Furry Slippers by Barbanègre are lively, colourful and offer quite a bit of fun to the story, especially with the deadpan expressions on some of the animals’ faces.

Recommended.

Tamara Opar is Section Head of Children’s and Teen Services at the Millennium Branch of the Winnipeg Public Library.

To comment on this title or this review, send mail to cm@umanitoba.ca.

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