Cinderella (As If You Didn't Already Know the Story) (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano, and: Cinderella (As If You Didn't Already Know the Story)
As the subtitle suggests, you already know the story; in this spare and humorously touched retelling, the fairy-tale protagonist initially hopes for the best from her father's remarriage, but of course her stepmother and stepsisters soon turn her into their drudge and dub her "Cinderella." She goes through the obligatory steps of ball avoidance, fairy-godmother intervention, and ball attendance, and the prince in turn falls in love, searches the country for his shoe-fitting true love, and proposes to Cinderella; the two do indeed live happily ever after, with the couple finding themselves in each other and the queenly Cinderella becoming a force for peace and ecology in the world. That ending, which isn't comedic enough to be parody, [End Page 495] is odd and incongruous since there's no basis in the story for either Cinderella's world concerns or for her ability to influence, so it's puzzling both why she "told the other nations one by one that their big bombs didn't interest her in the least" and why those nations would care. The rest of the story is a fairly straightforward account that doesn't really offer much that couldn't be found in the multitudes of retellings already lining the shelves. Ensor has a nice line in quiet wit, though (the prince is enamored because "nobody had ever ditched him or enchanted him like this"), and she adds some pleasing personal touches in the lives of her enchanted couple: the prince is thrilled to find out that his beloved is, like him, stuck amid an embarrassing family, and Cinderella writes touching letters to her late mother, keeping her up to date, in a device that recalls the dead mother's intervention in the Grimms' version. Ensor doesn't really flesh out the story in the way Napoli or McKinley would, but readers who'd like a quick, accessible revisitation touched with modern sensibility will likely find this a pleasing trip to the ball. Dramatic graphic silhouettes, looking like cut-paper in their monochromatic vigor, add a cool contemporary edge.
