THE FAIRY TALE FIXERS

Cinderella’s story, artfully retold and starring a pair of mice.

Cinderella toils for her demanding family day and night. Her stepsiblings shriek incessantly; even the household animals are losing sleep. So the house mouse enlists the Fairy Tale Fixer, a rodent detective in a trench coat who’s a bit clueless but always up for a challenge. The best way to end the noise is to get Cinderella out of the house, so the Fixer (donning fairy wings, a tiara, and a dress, the better to fit in) and the significantly smarter house mouse devise a plan to get her to the prince’s ball. Prince Edward turns out to be an incessant chatterbox, so the crew must improvise to extricate Cinderella from an unpleasant situation and help her achieve her real dreams. Cinderella’s freshly reimagined adventure departs skillfully from its source material. A running joke about the Fixer’s yearning for pancakes, various visual gags (including three characters standing on one another’s shoulders and disguising themselves with a long coat), the Fixer’s snarky internal monologue, and dramatic overreactions keep the energy buzzing throughout this graphic novel. Sketchy, playfully colored illustrations enhance the excitement. Cinderella and her family are brown-skinned; Prince Edward is tan-skinned and blond.

A funny, energetic riff on a familiar tale.