THE GIRL WITH A DONKEY TAIL

The first problem with this would-be fairy tale is that it has a hole where the central character should be--making it impossible even to re-tell from any consistent, meaningful point of view. A little girl with a donkey's tail, who's dreamt her name is Cloralinda, lives in a cave with three bears. She finds a ring engraved ""Take me to the princess,"" and starts out not knowing what princess where. She gets help and hindrance from wolf Franz Lupus; hacks her way through a hedge between his domain and the kingdom of Eeloff; meets up with a boatman who tells her a long sad story about a princess-nurse, Mary Jane, and a lost baby princess, Comet; gets ashore and finds the Egg Woman of the Mossy Well who gives her a truth-inducing egg laid by Mother Goose (yes, we had the same thought)--which she feeds to the princess Mary Jane who tells her that little lost Comet was born with a tail. . . whereupon Cloralinda knows it is she! Why, then, ""Cloralinda""? Her aunt, Mary Jane, believes that the name Comet, chosen before her birth, is the reason she was born with a tail; Cloralinda was Mary Jane's unclouded alternative. Except for that bit of word-juggling, a pointless patchwork with pictures as flimsy as the story.