THE DOOR IN THE HEDGE

McKinley, who made a young novel out of "Beauty and the Beast" (Beauty, 1978), now offers a quartet of fairy tales—two of them original and two retellings. Her "Twelve Dancing Princesses" extends that already polished and felicitously shaped tale to 77 pages—gracefully, but without any gain in dimension or viewpoint. More is lost in "The Frog Prince," which becomes a romantic fairy tale without the folk tale's compelling undercurrents. Of the two original stories, "The Stolen Princess" is the more original and distinctly charming; it begins with human children being tragically stolen by fairies and ends with a blending of a human and a fairy population. "The Hunting of the Hind," about a brave prince, a brave princess, and their breaking of an evil enchantment, is accomplished but more conventionally typical. There's far more to Grimm and to the fairies than McKinley cares to acknowledge. However, girls reluctantly outgrowing the romantic fairy tales now packaged for a younger audience will find these crystal-clear and melodic renditions.