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376 pages, Hardcover
First published May 22, 2018
Spring breezes caused the snowdrifts to round and slump, wearing them thinner until yellow grass and mud showed through. The longer days tempted me back to the rose garden, where buds were beginning to form. Bright green haloes softened the skeletal angles of branches, and then one day, the trees burst into full leaf. Swallows darted and swooped in the fresh-scrubbed spring air.
"Compelling fiction often obscures the humble truth."
"Society has strong opinions about what is beautiful and what is not."
"Being strong does not disqualify you from being beautiful."
"Compelling fiction often obscures the humble truth."
I wonder sometimes if the thoughts that flock my nightmares are abandoned memories coming home to roost.
I no longer believe that people are born without virtue. It gets beaten out. Misfortune threshes our souls as a flail threshes wheat, and the lightest parts of ourselves are scattered to the wind.
I was a mouse trapped in a corner, looking for a crack to flee through but dispairing of finding one.
"Imagine what ideas are locked up in the hearts and minds of women who simply lack the tools to express them."
I was a candle that had never known a flame, and now that the flame was lit, I softened and glowed in a way I had not known was possible.
Our fascination with feminine beauty is elemental. It is said that men wish to possess the princess and women wish to be the princess, but I believe that is only part of the truth. We are drawn to extraordinary beauty mindlessly and purposelessly; we flutter on dusty moth wings toward the effulgence with no understanding of why we do it. Perhaps when we see a woman with the aspect of an angel, our souls are tricked into following her, mistaking her for a guide to paradise.
The opposite, of course, is also true.
The stories we tell ourselves have great power.
Because misfortune does not wait idly by until we are prepared for it.
"Rich only matters if he marries you," I said grimly. "Handsome matters not at all."
"You speak of love? Love is a sickness that causes men and women to do stupid things, the sorts of things that leave them sad and broken when the fever passes."
Suppers at the royal court have become entirely too oppressive.
I hardly remember my own mother.
A soulful, gut-wrenching, dark and disturbing retelling of Cinderella. It reminded me of Fairest by Marissa Meyer, another step-mother origin story. Like Fairest it was morbid and oft times sickening but I was entranced and couldn’t stop. Unlike Fairest, it was more real, mature and grounded and thus hit much harder due to the absence of fantasy or sci-fi elements.
The book is bursting with sadness and struggle and lead by a strong, admirable woman, the step-mother, who is lovable to her core. Cinderella on the other hand possesses more vices than virtues and is tolerable at best and detestable at worst.