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Informationen zum Autor Cameron Dokey is the author of nearly thirty young adult novels. Her other fairy tales include The Storyteller’s Daughter , Sunlight and Shadow , and Golden . She has also written the #1 bestselling How Not to Spend Your Senior Year . She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband and four cats. Klappentext In this value-priced bind-up of three beloved retellings, readers will journey to faraway fairy tale lands. "Before Midnight" revisits Cinderella's story in France, "Golden" puts a new spin on Rapunzel's romance, and "Wild Orchid" reimagines the Chinese tale of Mulan. Once WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT YOURSELF? WHAT ARE YOUR stories? The ones you tell yourself, and the ones told by others. All of us begin somewhere. Though I suppose the truth is that we begin more than once; we begin many times. Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done. This is the first story I ever heard about myself: that I came into this world before my time. And that my coming was so sudden, hot, and swift, it carried everything before it away, including my mother’s life. Full of confusion was the day of my birth, of portents, and of omens. Just at daybreak, a flock of white birds flew across the face of the sun. Its rising light stained their wings bloodred. This was an omen of life taking flight. At full noon, every single tree in every single orchard on my father’s estate burst into bloom at once, in spite of the fact that it was October. This was an omen of life’s arrival. At dusk, a great storm arose, catching everyone by surprise. My mother was in her garden, the one she planted and tended with her own two hands, when two claps of thunder, one from the east and the other from the west, met above her head in a great collision of sound. The earth shook beneath her feet. Crying out, my mother tumbled to the ground. What this portended nobody ever did decide, because it was at precisely this moment that I declared my intention to be born. Fortunately for my mother, she was not alone. The healer, Old Mathilde, was with her, as she often was when my father was away from home. Just how old Old Mathilde is, no one really knows. But no matter what her years, she was strong and hale enough to lift my mother up and carry her indoors—through the gate in the garden wall and around the side of the house, up the steps to the front door, and across the great hall. Then, finally, up a wide set of stairs from the great hall to the second floor. By the time Old Mathilde reached my mother’s chamber, it was storming in earnest, and she, herself, was breathing hard. The wind wailed like a banshee. Hailstones clattered against the roof with a sound like military drums. Old Mathilde set my mother gently on the bed, paused to catch her breath. Then she summoned Susanne, who worked in the kitchen, instructing her to bring hot water and soft towels. But when Mathilde went to stir up the coals, the wind got there first, screaming down the chimney, putting out the fire. Not content to do this in my mother’s room alone, the wind then extinguished every other fire throughout my father’s great stone house by the sea, until not so much as a candle remained lit. All the servants quaked in fear. The women buried their heads beneath their aprons, and the men behind their arms, for nobody could remember such an event ever occurring before. And so it was first in shadow, and then in darkness, that Old Mathilde and my mother strove to bring me into the world. Just before midnight...
