AXOLOTL-ELLA

A retelling of “Cinderella” centered on an animal unlikely to get the Disney treatment.

“Once upon a warm and murky lake, there lived a quick and clever salamander named Axolotl-Ella.” Axolotl-Ella has plans—“huge plans,” stresses the book’s peppy omniscient narrator: She wants to meet the Prince. (As it turns out, it’s not for the reason that readers of fairy tales might expect.) Axolotl-Ella attends all three nights of the King’s Festival, and each night, she dazzles the Prince, but he’s such a self-absorbed gasbag that before she can get a word in edgewise, it’s midnight, when she must leave. On the festival’s last night, Axolotl-Ella makes a dramatic exit: Her arm comes off because the Prince was holding her hand when she fled. (The narrator explains that axolotls can regrow missing body parts—”Cool, right?”—although the Prince, an axolotl himself, somehow doesn’t know this.) The Prince sets out to find his “poor beautiful princess” with the missing arm, inspiring Axolotl-Ella’s jealous stepsisters to yank off one another’s arms and claim to be the missing princess. OK, that sounds gruesome, but it’s played for laughs that are helped along by Cho’s loose, cartoonish art in juicy, rambunctious colors. A funny running gag involves Axolotl-Ella’s unwillingness to bother with high-heeled party slippers: “Shoes made of glass?...Worst idea ever.”

A cheeky inverted fairy tale with a scientific bent and a feminist heart.