Prince Amilec

Last night I reread parts of my copy of The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales (ed. Alison Lurie) because I had a craving for one of the stories in there. The story was Prince Amilec by Tanith Lee, a British author who seems to span various genres. The story follows a young prince as he attempts to court a rude and cruel princess. To win her hand in marriage, the prince must perform various impossible tasks, which he can only do with the help of a witch. The witch in the story is very attractive and kind, as as a result of her help he eventually realizes that he wants to marry the witch and not the princess. All seems to be happy though as the rude princess eventually sets out to see the world and falls in love with an equally obnoxious prince. To win his hand, she needs to seek out a wizard in a situation that mirrors that of our hero, Prince Amilec.

I loved the flow of this story and the dialog that occurs between Amilec and the witch. The story itself would make a great picture book; I wonder why no one has ever approached Ms. Lee into doing it or if she has refused offers in the past. Whatever the case may be, it's a wonderful story. I would give it a full 5 out of 5 stars.

In library news, I finished creating a new sign to highlight the Cinderella books in the Folktales collection. Granted, we really don't need one, but I found some great clip art princesses from Microsoft that I've been dying to use. Also, the one good thing I'll say about Vista is that you can now edit clip art, so I was able to customize some of the princesses. On the sign, I had Cinderella characters from Ireland (Trembling from Fair, Brown & Trembling), China (Yeh-Shen from Yeh-Shen: The Chinese Cinderella), Mexico (Little Gold Star from Little Gold Star), Africa (Nyasha from Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters), Russia (Vasilisa from Vasilisa the Beautiful), and India (Cinduri from The Enchanted Anklet).

In doing this, I found out that the library currently does not have any copies of an Indian variant of Cinderella. They probably used to, but the copies may have been weeded out or stolen as the years have gone by. Luckily, I was able to get our amazing Children's Selector on it, and I'm positive she'll be able to locate something soon. Yay productive work day!