Bella at Midnight

Bella at Midnight
Author: Diane Stanley
Illustrator: Bagram Ibatoulline
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN-10: 0060775734
ISBN-13: 978-0060775735

I always love it when some clever author takes an old fairytale and slaps it onto the potter’s wheel of their imagination till it becomes something wonderfully new and fresh with the shimmering strands of the old story glistening through it. I am always in awe when it works as beautifully as Bella at Midnight. Diane Stanley has taken Cinderella and created something entirely new and fascinating. I found myself caught up in every word of her story till I emerged breathless at the end.

Bella at Midnight is the story of Bella, a golden haired girl who’s mother dies in childbirth. Her intense and a little nutty knight of a father is so angry that she (as he sees it) caused her mother’s death that he has her aunt take the child away to be fostered. She is taken to another town and given to a peasant to be wet nursed alongside a prince named Julian. They grow up together and become great friends till the day that Julian treats her badly and breaks her heart. That very day, he is sent away as a hostage to a neighboring kingdom as insurance that the peace treaty is not violated.

In the meantime, Bella who has loved her life with the peasants is all of a sudden taken away to live with her crazy father and his new wife and daughters. She is miserable in the loveless and cold home of her father. While living in her father’s house, Bella hears of a plot to violate the treaty and ultimately put Julian in danger of death so being the brave girl she is, she sets off to save him.

The writing is stellar and the story is great. I loved that the heart of the story is honesty, loyalty and love. Bella is a wonderful character and readers are going to love both her and Julian. I loved that in this book, the fair maiden sets off to save the prince instead of vice versa. Bella at Midnight does old fairytales proud while bringing them a more modern sensibility and giving women their due strength while keeping them womanly.

Bound

Bound
Author: Donna Jo Napoli
Publisher: Atheneum
ISBN-10: 0689861753
ISBN-13: 978-0689861758


Bound is the most wonderful Cinderella story I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. It’s based on a classic Chinese tale and it is simply beautiful.

Xing Xing, also called Lazy One by her stepmother is lonely and mistreated after the death of her father. She often goes down to the pool near her family’s cave and communes with a beautiful white carp that she comes to believe holds the spirit of her dead mother. She dreams of poetry and practices her calligraphy whenever she can. Her stepsister Wei Ping lies in pain all day long due to her badly bound feet, so Xing Xing has to do all the work. When her stepmother sends her on a mission to sell medicine to a traveling doctor, Xing Xing’s adventures begin and she begins to find her own strength and value as a person.

Once she returns to her village, Xing Xing finds life even harder. Her stepmother kills the beautiful white carp and Xing Xing is devastated. She digs in the garbage heap to find the bones of the fish she believes was her mother reincarnated and then digs deep into the cave to hide the bones. In doing so, she finds a beautiful gown and other things her mother left there for her. Xing Xing wears the gown to a village festival and attracts the eye of a handsome prince.

Donna Jo Napoli writes such a strong and moving story. The characters are wonderfully complex and interesting. It’s an incredible survival story and one of great depth. While Bound is set in ancient China, the story is very much a 21st century story with a strong female heroine who stays true to herself in the face of incredible adversity.

About the Author:

Donna Jo Napoli is the acclaimed and award-winning author of many novels - both fantasies and contemporary stories. She won the Golden Kite Award for Stones in Water in 1997. Her novel Zel was named an American Bookseller Association Pick of the List, a Publishers Weekly Best Book, a BCCB Blue Ribbon, and a School Library Journal Best Book, and a number of her other novels have been slected as ALA Best Books. She is the head of the linguistics department at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband and their children.