Ella Enchanted

Ella Enchanted YU Gail Carson Levine

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The Curse of Obedience . . .

Anyone could control me with an order. It had to be a direct command, such as “Put on a shawl,” or “You must go to bed now.” A wish or a request had no effect. I was free to ignore “I wish you would put on a shawl,” or “Why don’t you go to bed now?” But against an order I was powerless.

If someone told me to hop on one foot for a day and a half, I’d have to do it. And hopping on one foot wasn’t the worst order I could be given. If you commanded me to cut off my own head, I’d have to do it.

I was in danger at every moment.

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A foreword from Gail Carson Levine

YU

A butterfly—just being itself, obeying no commands from a misguided fairy—flaps its wings in your backyard, and a few weeks later, a hurricane brews over a distant ocean. But no wing flap, no hurricane.

It’s called chaos theory. This happens; surprise! that happens. You overhear something—say, about broccoli—when you’re three. Five years later, you stumble over an untied shoelace. Twelve years later, you pick your college major, music therapy. You can’t see how, but without those precipitating events, your major and the life that follows would be different.

Maybe worse, maybe better, but different.

Same with the origins of Ella Enchanted.

I wasn’t born reading. I learned at the usual time, in first grade, and I was hooked. The butterfly flapped its wings. My grandmother warned that too much reading would ruin my eyesight, but I couldn’t hear her over the chatter of characters.

Reading became less important only than breathing. I used to ask myself odd questions, like whether I’d rather lose my hearing or my eyesight. Easy.

Hearing could go—there were no audio books back then.

Or whether I’d rather be unable to speak or

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unable to read. I really liked to talk, so that one was unanswerable.

From my birth until my sister at long last left for college, she and I shared a bedroom (though she would much rather have had another turtle). She was five years older and could—and did—dream up tricks and tortures that inevitably took me by surprise. I was too young to retaliate, so I just endured.

Nowadays, she’s such a decent, kind person, I can hardly believe she would ever have tortured a fellow being—but I have the scars. For example, my left thumb is still a little peculiar looking.

Might she be the prototype Lucinda? She had all the power, and she was untroubled about the possible effects of her magic.

Reading was my sole privacy, because no one can join you in a book, not even a tormenting sister. In our cramped New York City apartment, the most private place was the bathroom, where I spent hours reading, to the dismay of everybody else—because we had only one!

If it had writing, I read it: cereal boxes, ads on the subway, billboards, highway signs. I don’t remember ever disliking a book. I read biographies and bible tales and realistic fiction, mostly classics by long-dead authors, like Heidi, Little Women, and Anne of Green Gables. And I read the fantasy that was available then, crumbs compared with the abundance kids have now: fairy tales, myths, tall

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tales, and Mark Twain’s fabulous time-traveling A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

If I loved a book or a story I read it again and again, many times over. Under hypnosis, I think I could recite both Anne of Green Gables and Pride and Prejudice by heart in their entirety. The butterfly flapped its wings again and language seeped into me. Good writing, I believe, organized my thoughts. One of my worries before Ella Enchanted was released was that, without realizing, I had plagiarized whole sentences, paragraphs, and pages from my favorite books. If I did, though, I’ve never been caught!

One more butterfly flap that I’m aware of is my luck in parents and even in having a sister. My dad, though smart, never finished high school, while my mother graduated from college at sixteen. My mom was the first in my father’s family, by birth or marriage, to finish or even attend college. Dad, who was humble about himself, was crazy proud of her excellent brain, and our brains, too. It would never have occurred to either of my parents that their daughters couldn’t do anything we set our minds to. They wouldn’t have thought to put it this way, but they believed in girl power.

Girl power zooms straight to Ella, who has the confidence to rebel and keep rebelling, using her brain and her ingenuity, until she earns her— happy? Well, I won’t give it away—ending.

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