Poetry Reflection: Cinderella Skeleton

San Souci, R.D.  (2000).  Cinderella skeleton. New York: Harcourt.

        I chose Cinderella Skeleton for my poetry reflection this week.  Since reading Ella Enchanted for my modern fantasy, I have been caught up in story of Cinderella.  There are so many versions of this traditional fairy tale!  To me, poetry is an expression of emotions and ideas, so I read this single-illustrated poem very carefully, ignoring the colorful illustrations of this picture book during my first reading. I wanted to visualize the characters of the poem without any help from an award-winning illustrator like David Catrow. While this picture book could be considered a fairy tale and modern fantasy, I believe it is better suited to the poetry genre.  

       This is a narrative poem which tells the story of a young Cinderella Skeleton who lives with her Stepmother Skreech and two awful stepsisters, Gristlene and Bony-Jane.  Cinderella attends a Halloween Ball with the help of a witch, meets Prince Charnel, and falls in love with her, um, handsome suitor. You know the rest of this story, but San Souci makes it an unusual tale with a “Nightmare Before Christmas by Tim Burton” perspective.  With all of the disgustingly descriptive and narrative language that assault your senses to help you visualize these odd characters, San Souci writes a tale in which you simply can’t ignore the sense imagery along with the beautiful, and weird, cartoon art of David Catrow.  Cinderella is “everything a ghoul should be” with “dankish hair hung down hanks,” yellow nails, and green teeth.

       Much like other fractured fairy tales, this book is filled with poetic elements and figurative language hidden within an interesting and macabre twist to the beautiful, well-loved fairy tale we know and love.   For example, the sound patterns jump from the pages as you read this poem aloud. From the very first stanza, you read rhymes in words like “fright” and “right” and alliteration, the repetition of beginning consonants, can be heard with “decayed, decrepit” and “withered wreath.”   

       As for figurative language, San Souci cleverly compares characters to other objects. When Prince Charnel says, “Your beauty burns like bonfires ablaze at night,” he is comparing Cinderella’s dazzling looks to a fire burning at night using a simile. (Wow!)  When Stepmother Skreech is berating Cinderella, she calls her “common clay” meaning that she believes her stepdaughter to be plain, undecorated, and, well, ugly using a metaphor.  These are common themes from the traditional Cinderella, but the ideas are re-worked and retold to engage even the faintest of heart.

       Because of the complexity of text and abstract ideas, I would not recommend this book to students younger than fourth grade.  However, this poem could be read to older students in connection with other ghoulish literature to set the mood for Halloween in a Language Arts class.  With a quick Internet search, I found an audio version and a short cartoon version of this tale, so it would be interesting for students to experience the story in different mediums and then write a personal response about which version they liked best.  It might also be helpful to read another version of a fractured Cinderella tale and make a comparison of stories. 

Curriculum Connection: CCR: Reading Literature 6.7 Compare and contrast the experience of reading a story, drama, or poem to listening to or viewing an audio, video, or live version of the text, including contrasting what they “see” and “hear” when reading the text to what they perceive when they listen or watch.

Big Questions: Why is Stepmother Skreech so mean to Cinderella? How is this version different than a traditional Cinderella tale?  If we change the setting of a story or a character, like in a fractured fairy tale, does this change affect the story’s themes?