A southern Chinese Cinderella story, familiar yet distinctly foreign in its details. It's a beautiful book, based on T'ang-era (618-907 A.D.) manuscripts. Unusually for a children's book, it keeps its distance from the reader. The heroine slips, swirls and ducks in and out of Ed Young's elusive, impressionistic illustrations, so that by book's end she is almost as much of a cipher as she was on the book's first page. Although young children may lose interest due to this lack of characterization, older readers may appreciate the extra room for imagination.  (CHN107, $17.99)