Cinderella of the Nile: One Story, Many Voices Series

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Narriman's dress was an absolute stand out—and for good reason. Seamstresses delicately sewed a stunning 20,000 diamonds sewn onto the fabric. And that wasn't all. It seems like Narriman couldn't decide whether she preferred diamonds or pearls—so she decided to have both. The queen wore an extravagant crown of pearls on her newly-royal head.

According to Narriman's second son, the Egyptian government began to rethink their warm welcome to ex-Queen Narriman. Instead of accepting her, they made life difficult for the new couple by trying her new husband for trumped-up offenses and forbidding him from practicing medicine. These stressful circumstances affected Narriman's new marriage enormously. Your child may be confident to read the story independently however it is fun to share the reading – parts could be ‘performed’ or read together for example Rhodopis’ song ‘Blow wind blow…’, Aesop’s story and conversations between the characters. This is not only good fun but can also help children gain a fuller understanding of the story and the language. Talk about the storyEven though she’d lived almost completely isolated from the world after her third marriage, she hardly left the house during the last three years of her life. The reason was mostly physical: She fell in the bathroom and broke her leg in 2002. Two years later, towards the end of 2004, she got pneumonia and had to stay in the hospital for a few weeks. Crown Prince Ahmed Fuad was born in January 1952, a month before the due date, and only eight months after Narriman had wed the king. An over the moon Farouk spent the early days lavishing attention on his son and wife. The king now had everything he wanted: a beautiful young wife and an heir to the throne. But things were going to change. And soon. The directors of this little bookshop were deeply opposed to the apartheid government that came to power in 1948 with ideas aligned to Nazism. They included Bram Fischer QC, from an eminent Afrikaner family, who defended Nelson Mandela and who, two years later, was himself sentenced to life imprisonment. My Blue Fairy Book must have been shipped from England along with much weightier matter intended to stir debate and political resistance. While the foreword in my book says that Andrew Lang and his helpers collected stories 'from the four corners of the earth', their world was essentially confined to the northern hemisphere. They ranged widely across Europe, occasionally straying eastwards to the Middle East and beyond. However, at the time, my mind was still travelling inside a bubble. It was a ‘European bubble’ in which most of the ideas, pictures and words were shaped in Europe. Today, there are many more books and stories that allow children to hear voices from around the world and that encourage them to move beyond a single story.

One question remains: Have Egyptians truly honored Narriman's tragic legacy? In 2010, her son, Akram Al Naqib, claimed they had not. He did admit, however, that there had been a recent interest in that era of history and stated that he hoped that would mean that Narriman would finally receive the recognition that she should have gotten during her lifetime. Narriman was unable to be present in her sons’ lives in the traditional way, but she tried to be there for them as best she could. Prince Fuad admitted that he blamed her for leaving him in infancy, though he should have directed the blame to his father. Narriman came to see him when Farouk allowed her to. She was a part of his wedding too. Cinderella of the Nile is introduced to the reader as the earliest known version of the fairytale. It tells the story in an alternative manner due to the different cultural settings of Greece and Egypt being explored as opposed to the typical western setting.Cinderella of the Nile is stunningly illustrated by Marjan Vafaeian, an artist working in Iran. How fascinating, I think, that the illustrator who first introduced me to Cinderella was born on one side of the Caucasus Mountains and now Marjan has worked her magic on the other! Splendidly illustrated by award-winning Iranian artist Marjan Vafaeian, this is the first in Tiny Owl’s series One Story, Many Voices. I still have my childhood copy of the Blue Fairy Book with its ‘Cinderella and The Little Glass Slipper’. It’s the version with the fairy godmother and the pumpkin, first written in French by Charles Perrault in 1697. A small label inside the cover shows that it was bought for me at the ‘People’s Bookshop’ in Johannesburg, the city where I grew up. The book was published in London in 1949 and my copy must have travelled soon afterwards on a boat to South Africa.