Someone must be keeping a complete list of fairy tales re-told, indexed by source matter. This isn’t me, but in the twenty years or so that I’ve been reading in this genre, I’ve noticed that a great proportion of the re-told tales seem to be versions either of "Cinderella" or "Sleeping Beauty."

Here, Ruth Nestvold‘s source tale for "Happily Ever Awhile" is "Cinderella," yet her story could serve just as well as the "what happened next" version of any fairy tale where the original ending was "And they lived happily ever after." Because the first thing we learn from the re-told tales is how this business of living happily ever after isn’t all it was cracked up to be. From the title, the reader might think that the question at the heart of this story is how long true happiness can last, but in fact, it proves to be the nature of happiness: how to know when you’ve found it, how to keep hold of it, how not to piss it away.

"Ox" is the sixth in Jenn Reese‘s series of Tales from the Chinese Zodiac.

In the Year of the Ox, instead of planting the usual crops, farmer Ting-An unwisely decides to trade his wife for animal seeds. The ox agrees to help him plow, in exchange for Ting-An’s promise to make him king of all the animals that grow in his fields.

This tale rings as true as a temple bell. More, it is wise, and allows the reader a chance to laugh at folly. A perfect fable.