Leaping Beauty and Other Animal Fairy Tales
By Gregory Maguire
Illustrator Chris L. Demarest

     Fractured fairy tales have been around forever. Remember “The Electric Company?” And how about those fairy tales where the princesses didn’t wait around to be rescued? And let’s not forget Disney’s version of every fairy tale under the sun.

     Gregory Maguire, author of such fairy tale revisionist histories as Wicked and Mirror, Mirror, serves up the traditional glass slipper, pumpkin coach and gingerbread house with a generous helping of irreverence and irony. Can you imagine:

     Cinder-Ella, an elephant who wears glass pie plates for glass slippers, possibly the only fairy-tale female to be stout and still win a prince? Hey, if you can bake pies for your wicked stepsisters and stepmother after your father has become a bus driver and driven off an iceberg, you deserve a prince.

     Or Beauty, a Marilyn Monroe-type sheep who tries to make it in the movies by trusting a snake (but enough about agents) and ends up finding true love in the supermarket line.

     Or Hamster and Gerbil, whose stepmother is a real skunk, who discover the meaning of brotherly and sisterly love by making porcupine roast, which is only fair because Granny Porky, the Wicked Witch in this story, wants to make shake-and-bake hamster cutlets.

     Little Red Robin, who visits his granny in a senior citizens’ home, does battle with the big bat cat who stands in for the wolf and dreams of being a superhero.

     Goldiefox, who discovers an Al Bundy-type father chicken and his dysfunctional families (but all fairy tales hinge on family conflict), and ends up breaking all the furniture while eating all the oatmeal. Does he get his just desserts? Maybe.

     The title character, Leaping Beauty, who gets cursed by an evil fairy hornet who really needs a social life.

      While kids ages 8-12 will enjoy the illustrations and the humor, especially fans of “Malcolm in the Middle,” the fairy tales manage to retain some of the gruesomeness of the original fairy tales. Lest we forget, in the original stories, wolves actually ate pigs (and grandmothers), and pigs retaliated by cooking wolves. The humor relies heavily on modern satire, which many adults will enjoy.