cover image Midnight: A Cinderella Alphabet

Midnight: A Cinderella Alphabet

Stephanie Perkal. Shens Books, $15.95 (32pp) ISBN 978-1-885008-05-3

Drawing from 21 versions of the Cinderella tale from 18 countries, Perkal alludes to a potentially rich range of stories: a Zuni Cinderella's kindness to turkeys is rewarded with a doeskin dress; a black ox helps a Korean Cinderella weed her rice fields; in an Irish tale, ""Cinderella"" is a lad who, after helping a princess, leaves his big boot behind as he flees in haste. But the alphabet format, which presents paragraph-long summaries of tales under such arbitrary headings as ""Ashes,"" ""Generous,"" ""Nature,"" ""Unfair"" and ""Yesterday,"" detracts from the ethnic variety. Bartsch's illustrations similarly subsume cultural difference, imposing imagery from the familiar French version upon all variations. Readers never see doeskin dress, ox or boot. For the Japanese story described in ""Invitation,"" for example, not only does the text fail to suggest anything distinctively Japanese--""her stepmother forbids her to go [to a play]... a great nobleman is captivated by her beauty""--but the cartoony illustration shows a man in formal 18th-century Western dress. The result is a book that homogenizes the differences it ostensibly seeks to point out, reducing variation to minor narrative details not even registered within the art. Ages 5-9. (July)