From my earliest childhood, there are few pleasures I’ve savored quite like getting lost in a bookstore. Wandering from shelf to shelf, eyes catching on curious covers or strange titles, pulling one out to read the dust jacket, then the first page...and then being told that the bookstore is about to close; can you please take any purchases to the front? And even as a adult, perhaps especially as an adult, I love to browse the children’s section. All of my old favorites are there--Lewis and Tolkien and L’engle and Alexander and so many more. Sometimes I’ll see a title that I haven’t thought of in years and be swept immediately back to childhood memories; more often, I’ll see a brand-new book that I wish had been in print when I was a kid.
It was only a few days after my first child was born that I found myself wandering a Barnes and Noble during my lunch break, looking for something a little special. Looking, in fact, for the first children’s book that I would ever buy for one of my own kids.
And my eyes landed on Interstellar Cinderella.
The “interstellar” part was an easy sell for me--I’ve always loved science fiction. The “cinderella” part gave me a moment’s pause, though, because I’m generally suspicious of attempts to update or improve old fairy tales. Some authors can pull it off, but many attempts I’ve read stray into the territory of stale, unimaginative, and downright preachy.
Fortunately, Deborah Underwood is one of the authors that can pull it off.
“Once upon a planetoid, amid her tools and sprockets, a girl named Cinderella dreamed of fixing fancy rockets.”
So begins the rhyming tale of a can-do STEM-oriented Cinderella whose greatest ambition is to graduate from the menial repair tasks given by her wicked stepmother to working on the finest of spaceships. Her chance comes when she attends a royal space parade (thanks to the timely aid of her fairy godrobot) and is able to repair the prince’s damaged spaceship.
Cinderella and the prince bond over their spaceship obsession, and when she flees the ball (her ship’s energy charge will run out at midnight) he vows to search the cosmos for her. It won’t be an easy quest--thanks to her helmet, the prince never actually saw Cinderella’s face--but the prince is determined. When Cinderella proves her identity by repairing another damaged ship (which her wicked stepsisters, of course, had failed to repair), the prince immediately proposes marriage. Cinderella, realizing that she’s a bit young to tie the knot, counter-proposes that she take the vacant position of the prince’s chief mechanic.
Those are the bones of the story. I have no idea why they work so well. It could be the playful way that Underwood works with the Cinderella story, or the energetic verse. It could be the plucky character of Cinderella. Whatever it is, it is certainly amplified by Meg Hunt’s excellent illustrations. The characters come to life on the page; my favorite picture is, without a doubt, the flatly unamused expression of the prince as he watches the wicked stepsisters struggle to repair a spaceship.
No, I think the best part of this for me is that rather than being a story about pursuing love--the quest of Cinderella for a prince who will sweep her off her feet--this is the story about pursuing the things you love. Cinderella reads ship repair manuals under the covers by flashlight and sneaks off to the parade to see the spaceships; the prince falls hard for a girl who shares his passion for spaceships even though he’s never seen her face. This is not love at first sight, a glass slipper, and a marriage; this is pursuing your dreams and, along the way, finding people who will share those dreams with you.
You can do worse for a bedtime story.
Comments
Post a Comment