Cinderella #257 The Cinderella Hour by Katherine Stone (2005)
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| A pair of little dolls. Left: An English girl in a gingham gown. Right: An American mini-doll from the 1960's. |
Adult fiction, 346 pages.Once upon a time, in Chicago, there lived an obsessive-compulsive mother with a little girl she called Snow. As a single mother, she supported her child with an assortment of telephone related business endeavours. At first, the mother conducted these in the bathroom, for privacy. But "once Snow was old enough to understand the conversations were make-believe", and her mother knew that she would stay silent, "they'd typically share the same space during the calls." Now, fastforward sixteeen years. The setting is the Hilltop Country Club, the event the Glass Slipper Ball. That is where Snow hears a voice. "Snow! You look radiant!' Fairy-Godmother Vivian exclaimed. 'That pink is fabulous on you!" But great sorrow was to follow Snow. A baby, conceived in joy, and experienced as a tender, growing spirit, perished suddenly. Tiny Wendy, "wasn't the joyful mermaid Snow had envisioned frolicking in an amniotic fluid sea, swimming lap after lap as her daddy — who didn't want her — did." Through the ensuing years Wendy, Daniel and Thomas, and, of course Snow, suffer through the stages of life and death, grief and sorrow, loss and reunion. In the end, another little girl is born. They call her Julie, and she is healthy and thrives. And "in loving Julie, they loved their Wendy too". They believed that "although she would never grow up to dance and dream, as Julie would, Wendy was dancing somewhere, in a pink satin gown with a sapphire shoe."
