SILVER WOVEN IN MY HAIR

If reading Cinderella stories consoles other girls who feel mistreated, does reading about a mistreated girl who savors Cinderella stories double the pleasure? There are bits of Cinderella, Tattercoats, and other such heroines in orphaned Thursey who toils for her stepmother and two stepsisters--and she herself is forever pointing out the parallels. Here too the prince gives a ball, and in this version a young goatherd, new on the scene, gives Thursey material for a gown, but her stepmother finds the finished dress and tears it to shreds. And so Thursey arrives late at the ball, clad in muslin and live roses--to enchant the prince of course, but also to discover (as readers have suspected for a while) that the prince is none other than her beloved, self-proclaimed goatherd. (As if this weren't enough, Thursey's mysteriously dead father is proclaimed a war hero at that very same ball. . . . The wishing cup runneth over.) In truth, Murphy's decorous language suits the piece: an expanded romantic fairy tale, deftly fabricated to indulge those who are reluctantly outgrowing the genre.