Early in my life, I became hooked on fairy tales. All I had to hear was "Once Upon a Time" and a tale owned me. I've spent many adult years wondering about the archetypes I accepted so easily as a child. The first book I remember is Cinderella, but on reflection, she's least appealing heroine. And yet, Cinderella is known all over the world. In her book, Through the Eyes of a Child, Donna Norton says that scholars have identified more than 900 versions of the Cinderella story world-wide.

Cinderella still endures. I can't remember a year when I haven't seen a release of at least one Cinderella story. This year's Cinderellas are an interesting mix and all of them are by female authors. The new picture books have some interesting twists that could lead to early comparative literature studies, but I'm most fascinated by it's the novelists' reworkings of this old tale.

Shirley Climo contributes her fourth well-written Cinderella picture book, The Persian Cinderella (HarperCollins, $15.95; ages 5-9) The Middle Eastern figure, Settareh, purchases a cracked bottle from the bazaar and finds it's filled with a pari ( fairy). The story is familiar in plot and symbol, but it's fun to note differences. Illustrator Robert Florczak has done his homework. He shows the architecture, customs, and costumes of the place and era with a rich palette of colors.

Raisel is the Jewish Cinderella heroine in Erica Silverman's Raisel's Riddle (FSG, $16.00; ages 8 and up). She loves learning, riddles, and her grandfather. When he dies, she refuses to be a burden on those who would care for her, and finds work in a rabbi's house. Uniquely set against a Purim backdrop, Raisel is an unusual Cinderella. She is strong and capable, and she wins the love of the rabbi's kind son, not solely with her beauty. Raisel cautions him, "look not at the flask but at what it contains" and the rabbi's son, enchanted with her wit and passion for learning, marries her. And the couple "lived and learned happily ever after."

Some recent Cinderella stories may have been inspired by Gail Levine who won a well-deserved Newbery honor award in 1997 for her first novel, Ella Enchanted. Ella Enchanted, which is new in paperback (HarperTrophy, $5.95) , seems the retelling response of an author who loves fairy tales, but hates Cinderella's wimpy character. Levine's Ella is compliant because she lives under the curse of a fairy who's given her a birth "gift" of obedience. As the plot unwinds, it explains all the traditional elements in an untradtional way, as Ella, an adventuresome linguist, tours us around her world of ogres, giants, and magical creatures. She uses wit and humor that win her the heart of the hero, Prince Charm, and lots of new reading fans, too! There's also a wonderful unabridged audio (Bantam Books Audio, $21.95) 055352528X read by Eden Riegel who played Young Miriam in "The Prince of Egypt". Her youthful voice took me a bit of getting used to, but I was won over by her talents at negotiating the difficult language of the fairy tale creatures, and the mastery of character's voices and inflections .

Another of my favorite books, Emma Donaghue's Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (HarperCollins, $11.00, mature twelve to adult)., is new to paperback . Mature themes of these short stories require young adult or adult readers to appreciate the new twists and the exquisite prose. Donaghue's Cinderella, for example, hears the prince's marriage proposal as words that leak out of his mouth in "a cloud that is white and soft and comfortable as fog" , but instead chooses to run away with her fairy godmother. Donahuge strings together gemlike images and invites readers deep into the hearts of traditional fairy tale heroines to see new truths buried in the stories of old.

Margaret Peterson Haddix takes readers past the "happily ever after" in Just Ella (Simon and Schuster, $17,00; ages 11 and up). Ella Brown, or Cinders-Ella, as she's called by her "Step-Evils", is living in the the castle waiting to be married. She finds Prince Charm distant, cold, and boring. Her illusions about royal life fade as she's tortured by long lessons on protocol, forbidden any self care, and is disgusted by the superficiality of court life. Only Jed Reston, her tutor, values thought and has loftier goals and inspires the introspective Ella to wonder about her own purpose. There is no fairy godmother in this version. It's Ella who takes charge of her destiny and changes a life of empty, shallow imprisonment into a full, loving, life of meaning.

Not all the Cinderella stories I read were successful. I was ambivalent about Mavis Jukes' millennium tale, Cinderella 2000 (Delacorte, $8.95; 10 and up). Fourteen-year-old Ashley Ella Toral is on the verge of having a boyfriend and is going crazy with her bratty twelve year old twin step twins and manipulative stepmother. Plot and character flaws, and the lack of depth I found in other stories, marred this book. However there were peculiar parallels and my curiosity about how this Cinderella escapes a codependent role were the magic that kept me reading to the end.

I've never read a variation of Cinderella with more cruelty than Adeline Yen Mah's memoir, Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter (Delacorte, $16.95; ages 12 and up). Mah, the author of the adult bestselling memoir Falling Leaves, has four older siblings who won't forgive her when her mother dies at her birth. When her uncaring father remarries, her siblings, step-siblings, and step mother torment her for over a decade. Mah suffers emotional and physical abuses, separation from the people who love her, and, is even left to face hostile Communists when her stepmother deserts her in a convent boarding school . Through it all she maintains high academic performance, hides her background from peers, and keeps her pride and self respect. Mah quotes Mother Teresa and eloquently sums up the core of all Cinderellas, "loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted are the greatest poverty." This theme, central to many women's lives, may be why so many female authors return to wondering and reinventing a Cinderella who has a stronger personality with a more satisfying happily ever after.