Story Time with Sara: Cinderella’s Secret Slipper by Alinka Rutkowska

Cinderella’s Secret Slipper
written by Alinka Rutkowska
published by Capraro Press 2015

find it here: (affiliate links) Amazon, iBooks, Smashwords, Goodreads

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange  for an honest review.

Did I enjoy this book: Cinderella’s Secret Slipper wasn’t a hit for me. I’m also not a big fan of the original Cinderella story, so that might be part of it.

The first thing that hit me about Secret Slipper was the title. I thought perhaps there was going to be a new secret pair of slippers for Cinderella. There were not. In fact, the slippers in question were the same famous (not secret) slippers that she wore the whimsical night that she met the perfect stranger that would save her from her life of drudgery.

The illustrations are very vibrant and colorful, but the actual drawing seemed a little childish to me. I felt as though the style of simplistic art didn’t quite jive with the semi-modernized fairy tale characters. My son, however, enjoyed going back and looking at all the pictures again while he “read” the story to me (but he did ask me why the four-year-old Junior looked like a baby . . .).

The story also lacked a bit in my book. In addition to being entertaining, I like my children’s stories to have a moral or a lesson. Like the moral of the original story, the only thing we learn from Secret Slipper is that a magical being will come and solve all your problems if you wait long enough. It would have been neat if Cinderella and Junior could have endeavored to discover their own secret magic in order to fix the broken shoe. Further, I was disappointed that there was no consequence for Junior for stealing his mother’s shoe and breaking it. He was merely told to go play with his dragon when he asked if he could help fix it. That’s not quite the direction I expected the book to take, considering it’s a children’s story.

I did like how the story had questions at the end of the book to test for reading retention/comprehension. My preschooler enjoyed answering the questions and going back to the story to check the answers. He had more fun doing this than reading the story the first time around. According to my son, the best part of the book was when Junior smashed the bug with Cinderella’s slipper!

 

Would I recommend it: If you have a child who adores Cinderella and can’t get enough of her, then this story will likely be a hit. However, if you are not a big fan of Cinderella (or bugs smashed with glass slippers), I would say there are other stories that can entertain and teach better than this one. If my son asks me to read it again I will, but Secret Slipper is certainly not my first choice of story book.

About the book – from Goodreads: Cinderella’s Secret Slipper is a story of our favorite princess who more than anything else wants to wear her famous glass slippers to her son’s birthday party. But she can’t because her four-year-old smashed one of them in an attempt at killing a mosquito on the wall. Where is she going to get a glass slipper now?