There are not a lot of things I like better than a Donna Jo Napoli book. So when Bound showed up the other day, I got pretty excited.

Napoli has made a career out of retelling fairy tales, and she sticks with that in her new book. Bound has a bit of a twist though, being set in Ming era China. Xing Xing is the Cinderella character, and her not so nice stepmother forces her to do all the work around the cave they live in. But she mostly doesn't mind, because her poor stepsister has her feet all bound up as her stepmother attempts to shrink them in order to land her a husband.

What I quite enjoyed about the book is that Napoli avoided the historical fiction trap of too much information, but I still feel like I know a lot more about the people of that time and place. Definitely there was a lot of detail about the nastiness involved in feet binding. In fact, my only real complaint is about the ending. It just felt a little too quick, and too neat for my taste.

Bound by Donna Jo Napoli
ISBN 0689861788
192 pages