posted on 01 Aug 2017

Ash Boy: A Cinderfella Story by Lucy Coats illustrated by Mark Beech

Imagine you’ve been asked to pick your favourite fairy story to rewrite. Just how daring would you be with a story everyone loves and knows so well? Well, Lucy Coats has really enjoyed herself here and completely restructured the Cinderella story - and it’s all great fun.

So just how daring has she been? Well, exit Cinderella, her ugly step-sisters, her night at the Ball and the glass slipper and enter Cinder Ashok, a mixed race boy who loves libraries and hates sport. I’d call that pretty radical.

None of these Barrington Stoke super readable editions are very long and the authors have the challenge of condensing stories without losing the momentum or cohesion and Coats does a really first rate job of it. She’s more than ably assisted in her task by the illustrator, Mark Beech whose illustrations capture the mood perfectly.

I loved the fact that Cinder Ashok is a geeky boy whose greatest wish is to be a librarian and even when his fortunes are transformed he still wants nothing more than to spend his time around books – you wont find any soppy romance here. Even though Ashok’s best friend, Buttons, turns out to be the Princess Betony, the reward isn’t marriage but a job in the royal library!

The traditional Cinderella story is built around the glamour and romance of a grand Ball and a dashing Prince but this story centres instead on a jousting competition and Ashok has to deal with ugly brothers who want their armour polished rather than the ugly vain sisters Cinderella is persecuted by. I’m sure that the changes Coats has made not only help us to see the story in a whole new way but may well enable boys to engage with a tale they often dismiss as something only girls would like.

In her interview for Barrington Stoke’s website in July, Lucy had this to say about her task:

Rewriting fairytales can be tricky, when every young reader practically takes in the sanitised ‘real’ stories with their mother’s milk (or, more accurately, through the medium of Disney). The originals are much darker, with one version of Cinderella having an Ugly Sister cut off her toes in her desperation to get the slipper on. I decided to put that bit back in, not gratuitously, but as a hat tip hinting at the older tale. Also, it’s just the kind of thing a blockheaded knight-stepbrother might do.

I believe that fairy tales belong to everyone, and that their nature is to change to reflect the times they are in. So Cinder does still get his heart’s desire – but it’s a bit different to what the original Cinderella’s was.

 

I think this is the sort of book that the most reluctant of readers would find irresistible but I also think this story would be great read out loud to a class of children - there’s plenty of scope for dramatic interpretation and the storyline is familiar enough to hook the children in and then continually surprise them.

Excellent stuff.

 

Terry Potter

August 2017