Horn Book

In this sweet tale of corpse-meets-corpse, San Souci creates a bony heroine whose trip to the ball has a distinctly Halloweenish cast. The plot follows the original folktale closely, with one grisly exception: instead of retaining her glass slipper, Prince Charnel gets her entire foot, snapped off halfway up the leg bone. The potentially scary moments are made humorous in Catrow's caricatures and dynamic compositions.

Kirkus Reviews

This fancy little piece of septet versifying works nicely as a vehicle to tell the story of the graveyard Cinderella. San Souci ( Callie Ann and Mistah Bear , p. 1045, etc.) follows the original tale quite closely, substituting things from the bone orchard where appropriate: her coach is a hearse; the prince is named Charnel; her stepfamily is Skreech, Gristlene, and Bony-Jane; and, of course, she herself is a skeleton. Instead of simply losing her slipper at the ball, this Cinderella has her lower tibia snapped off. (Picture the prince traveling everywhere with the foot in a velvet case.) Yes, there are touches of the macabre here (each prospective bride pulls her own foot off to try on Cinderella's), but never overmuch or to the point of terrifying. And most of it is hysterically funny. San Souci's verse ultimately takes the show: "Cinderella Skeleton! / The rarest gem the world has seen! / Your gleaming skull and burnished bones, / Your teeth like polished kidney stones, / Your dampish silks and dankish hair, / There's nothing like you anywhere! / You make each day a Halloween." What a picture she makes. Catrow's ( The Fungus That Ate My School , p. 474, etc.) artwork is reminiscent of The Nightmare Before Christmas —perhaps that can't be helped when skeletons are the principals—but very much its own thing, with abundant cartoony comic licks and ghoulish creatures galore. (Picture book. 3-7)

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

"No glass slipper appears in this often funny graveyard romance," <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">PWsaid. "Instead, the skeletal prince breaks the heroine's shinbone as she flees the Halloween Ball. A Cinderella story that girls <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">and boys will love." Ages 3-7. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(Sept.)

School Library Journal

Gr 3-7-Not for the faint of heart, this retelling continues the author's fascination with "Cinderella" tales. In challenging vocabulary and a complex rhyme scheme, the clever narrative tells of Cinderella Skeleton, a wraith who lives in a mausoleum with her horrific stepmother, Skreech, and stepsisters Gristlene and Bony-Jane. She wiles away her days streaking the windows, hanging cobwebs, and feeding bats until the Halloween Ball invitation arrives. A good woodland witch conjures up the usual participants into a funeral wagon, dragon steeds, a gown, and slippers, but in fleeing from Prince Charnel at sunrise, Cinderella breaks off her slippered foot mid-calf. Gross, yes, though later other ghosts break off their shinbones with the hope of fitting the leg-and-slipper remains ("Wire or glue; you're good as new!" snaps the stepmother as she pulls off each girl's foot). Catrow's wonderfully weird pencil-and-watercolor illustrations feature wiggly lines, lurid pink and bilious green accents, large-eyed skeletons, and grotesque mutantlike creatures. The envious stepfamily conveniently shrivels to dust, which is certainly less horrible than other endings (though younger readers will still be disturbed about those broken legs). This darkly humorous and spooky variation will tickle the twisted tastes of upper-elementary and middle-school readers if it is displayed where they'll find it.-Susan Hepler, Burgundy Farm Country Day School, Alexandria, VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.