Beauty and The Beast
From ”A Fractured Fairy Tale” by A.J. Jacobs

This is a modern interpretation of the classic fairy tale. Jacobs took all the clichés from the classic fairy-tale, and either commented on them or simply altered them slightly. A good example of Jacobs commenting on the classic fairy-tale writing would be the introduction to the fairy tale, in which he wrote:
“Once upon a time there was a magnificent golden castle on a silver cloud high up in the sky, which has nothing to do with anything because our story is about an old woodchopper who lived in a shack, but that's a good way to start a fairy tale.”
This is a somewhat fairy tale classic since it starts with the characteristic “Once upon a time…”, but Jacobs have merely altered it a bit and states that it’s simply a pleasing way to start a fairy tale. At the time the reader gets past this, he or she instantly realise that this is no regular fairy tale.

Another rather significant difference between this interpretation and the original fairy tale is that in this story, the main protagonist is the “beast” and the prince she is pursuing is, at first glance, the beauty.
Our main protagonist is described as somewhat ugly, hence her feeling very lonely. In order to cope with her loneliness, her father brought her a mule.
And then something interesting happens: She tries to kiss the mule, in a desperate attempt to turn the mule into a magnificent prince. The interesting thing about this is that she somehow knows about the fairy tale phenomenon where animals turn into princes. This is also a slight change in the story and time.

The next day her father gives her a bundle of sticks to take to the town, another fairy tale classic, which Jacobs also notifies the reader about in this quote:

"A bundle of sticks?" she asked him. "What for?"
"How should I know," said the old man. "But somebody is always carrying a bundle of sticks around in fairy tales. You know that."

This makes his daughter saddle up her mule and travel to town. As she sits upon her mule, something remarkable happens: As long as she sits on her mule, she is turned into a magnificent and beautiful maiden, instead of her rather plain and ugly self. She travels to town as this beautiful lady, where she meets a prince who of course instantly falls in love with her and they set up a meeting at “Eightish o’clock” at her house. But as the daughter stood off the mule she turned into her old and unappealing self.
When he came to her house she wasn’t the beautiful maiden he had met earlier, which makes him ride back home.

Her being turned into something beautiful is relatable to the tale of Cinderella, who also turns into a beautiful lady, instead of her plain, floor mopping old self.
Another association to Cinderella is given by the fact that the prince gets let down by her not being the picturesque maiden he had expected – Equal to when the prince in Cinderella finds out that the shoe doesn’t fit either of the older sisters.

"I get it now," she said out loud to no one in particular, as people in fairy tales sometimes do. "This is a magic mule. As long as I sit on this beast, I'm a beauty!"
Here is another fairy tale archetypal defined by the author. He mentions the stereotypical fairy tale main character that talks with them selves, is given a helper (the mule) and more specifically for this fairy tale, the whole “Beauty and the beast” conflict: What defines beauty? Since she’s the same person on the mule as she is off the mule, she must be beautiful in any state of her self. This is also what the prince realises in the end, where he decides to get married with the daughter even though she insists on never demounting the mule.

Although the daughter swore to stay on the mule, she eventually forgot it one day when her hat blew off. The prince finds out about her secret, which makes the daughter embarrassed and scared that he might leave her – but it just happens that his horse has the same ability as hers, and when he demounted the horse he was just as ugly as her.

As for fairy tales, there is supposedly always a happy ending, and this one is no exception. They accept each other even though they both obviously posses certain “disappointments”, if you keep their first glimpse of each other in mind.
This is obviously relatable to the real world, which makes up one of the several morals of this fairy tale: Don’t judge a book by its cover.