In a cultural climate where it sometimes seems that just about every possible change has been rung on the old tales by professional storytellers, political revisionists, animators and parodists, it comes as a delightful surprise to discover that there are still opportunities so obvious as to have been overlooked.

Even more delightful is the recognition that the right person has seized one of them. It may be that I have missed a previous attempt, but to the best of my knowledge Laura Cecil’s reversal, or inversion, of “The Frog Prince” in which she hits on the simple and beautifully worked-through idea of having the Prince manoeuvred into a situation where he has to agree to marry the enchanted (and, in this case, enchanting) frog is entirely original.

The Frog Princess tells of how Prince Marco, the Queen’s youngest son (and, in keeping with the story’s new emphasis, there’s no King in evidence) loves to lie in the grass gazing at flowers and insects. He and his two brothers, a glutton and a narcissistic clothes-horse, are commanded to find wives by firing arrows into the air and taking their brides from where they land. It’s the Queen who provides them with their bows and arrows so obviously she knows what she’s doing.

Indeed the tale’s whole subtext is the controlling force of female intuition. The gluttonous son gets a baker’s daughter, the clothes-horse a milliner’s and Marco - who, says the Queen, “spends too much time thinking about nothing” and whose arrow lands in a ditch - gets the frog. Three practical tasks set for each of the brothers’ brides ensue, designed to decide which is the cleverest, since the Queen intends, in effect, to hand the country over to the woman “since all my sons are fools”.

Needless to say, the frog comes out top while Marco manages to explain away her absence from court as being “because she has a croak in her throat”. When, of course, she has to appear (Marco having agreed to marry her because “he could not bear to hurt her feelings”), she does so in a transformation scene brilliantly realised by Emma Chichester Clark’s double-page spread, a passionate beauty born to rule, her gold hair streaming out behind her as she drives her own carriage and pair which a moment earlier has been a water-lily leaf and two snails. The coronation festivities over, with more than a hint of Paula Rego’s painting “The Dance” in another fine illustration’s deployment of moonlight, shadow, and deep purples, Marco’s Queen rules the Kingdom while Marco himself lies in the grass where we first met him, gazing at flowers and insects.

Set beside this subtly challenging little book, any conventional retelling is likely to suffer by comparison. Vikram Seth’s Arion and the Dolphin, adapted from his libretto for an opera and lavishly decorated by Jane Ray, is an interesting mixture of prose and verse, the recitative giving way intermittently to arias and duets. Every page is a work of art in itself, but the text is not quite strong enough to melt the tears which somehow remain frozen on the stylised face of Arion as he holds the dead dolphin in his arms.

Neil Philip’s version of King Midas sticks closely to Ovid’s, and provides an efficient text for a book the main attraction of which is its clever use of gold leaf. Tip the pages so that they catch the light and everything which Midas has touched leaps out and dazzles. Isabelle Brent’s pictures are certainly more than mere gimmickry, however, and there’s a particularly haunting one of Midas bathing in the river Pactolus, with just his head above water and the “taint of gold” washing off him in flakes which float on the surface.