Princess Furball

Author: Charlotte Huck
Illustrator: Anita Lobel
1989 Greenwillow Books

This book was quite different from the story of Cinderella that I am most familiar with. There are no evil stepsisters or an evil step mom. This is a European version of the classic story that most girls fall in love with when very, very young.

The princess has a father, a king, and he does not have much time to attend to her but she has an Old Nurse who is very wise and tries to make the princess as happy and successful as possible. She is allowed to play with the children from the village, visit the Cook and learn from him, but the Old Nurse never forgot that she was still a princess so she still is taught the most proper of manners, has many tutors. "...so the Princess grew to be strong and capable and clever, besides being beautiful." The classic image of what a princess is like, at least in the fairy tales. Well the Old Nurse dies and she is basically all alone once again. To make matters worse her father promises her to an Ogre, so she asks her father for three wedding presents. She is clever in thinking that these will be impossible to attain but alas her father was successful in giving her the gifts: three dresses - "one as golden as the sun, another as silvery as the moon, and the third as glittering as the stars." The last gift was finally ready, a fur coat made of thousands of different kinds of fur. The Princess decides that she must run away, so she does, she pack up some of her belongings and is on her way. She is found later the next day sleeping in the trunk of a tree by the King whose land she was on. She is taken by them and forced to work in the kitchen doing all the chores that no one wants to do. One day the King has a ball at the castle and the Princess convinces the Cook to let her go for half an hour. She runs to her shed and put on one of her dresses and goes to the ball, well this happens three different times. The King finally realizes that she was the mysterious woman from the balls and begs her to marry him and it happens the very next day. Finally after all of her troubles she gets the fairy tale ending, and lived happily ever after with the King.

Like I said this was some what close to the version of Cinderella that I was familiar with, but it had its own twist to it that the Disney version does not have. I really enjoyed this one, but the Disney version is still better, in my opinion, but that may be just because I am familiar with it and have grown up with that version. This story is also very classic and I could see it being around for a long time and being read to many, many little girls. I was not particularly a huge fan of the illustrations in the book. I really only liked the way that the hair on the characters was done, for some reason. The princess of course had the most lavish and beautiful hair compared to all of the rest in the book. They were done with watercolor and gouache. The illustrations were also one page ones where each page had a distinct and relevant panting to correspond to the text. I suppose I also loved two of the dresses that were in the story, that one that was of the sun and the other of the moon. The thing that I love about fairy tales is that although not possible it teaches children to think outside of what they know is reality and reach beyond to what their minds can create. Now you can't encourage this to go too far or the child may get stuck in the fairy tale world, ha (I would love to live there!!!). One thing that as a teacher you could do, is read the original (or even have the class take turns adding a part of the story outloud) and then read this version and after all of that is said and done, the children could create a story of their own. It could be developed into an on going process that would work on writing and reading skills.

"Fractured Fairy Tales: Cinderella"