PAGES : A Fairy Tale With a Twist

Gentle maidens, weak but beautiful. . . .

Strong, handsome saviors who arrive on horseback to deliver them from evil. . . .

Fairy tales have been drenched in implicit sexism for so long that it’s hard to imagine gender enlightenment making any kinds of inroads in this genre.

And yet in Nancy Willard’s retelling of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” for Scholastic Books, the title character is--get this--a saucy redhead named Sylvia.

Rather than mess around in a broom factory, Willard has turned Sylvia into a seamstress. The agent of demonic destruction thus becomes an out-of-control sewing machine, an antique Singer imbued with just a little bit too much magic.

Willard comes to her feminist revisionism honestly. Her father was a chemist, and she remembers that as she wandered through his lab as a child, it always looked as if it belonged to a magician.

That same feeling possesses Sylvia as she enters the fantasy world ruled by old Tottibo, a magician who “stood so tall his very shadow chilled them all.”