Guest Post: Disney's Cinderella (from Matthew)

Disney’s Cinderella

or “Why This Movie Really Isn’t As Bad As You Think It Is” - by Matt Guion

Seriously, people. It’s not.

Okay, to be fair, Disney’s Cinderella is one of the earliest movies I remember watching. My family didn’t get a VCR until I was about three, and we only had a handful of VHS home movies, of which Cinderella was one, and one that I watched a lot. So yeah, there’s a fair amount of nostalgia attached with this film. But the same can also be said for Shirley Temple’s The Little Princess, and I have no qualms whatsoever about ripping that movie to shreds. So, that being said . . .

Cinderella came after something of a dry spell for Disney animation, partly due to the war and a reliance on “package films,” or movies that told more than one story. Cinderella was the first full length animated feature since Bambi to tell one story, and only the second full length animated feature to be based on a faerie tale. And like Snow White, it was a big hit, and effective started Disney’s classic era, which would sustain them for much of the next couple decades.

This time, Disney tackled a story that was well-known and universal, the classic rags to riches story, and while they definitely put the Disney spin on it, they also stayed pretty true to the source material. But what I have found, after watching it again, is that the things about this movie that I’m not crazy about are the things from the original story that they stayed true to. Pretty much everything Disney DID add their touch to, I liked better.

So, starting from the beginning: the movie opens, just as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, with the storybook exposition, where a narrator gives us the beginning of the story. Cinderella -- who, incidentally, has that name with no sort of explanation behind it -- is the daughter of a wealthy widower, who marries Lady Tremaine believing that Cinderella needs a mother. Lady Tremaine has two daughters of her own, Anastasia and Druzella, both of whom are generally spiteful and mean-tempered. Then, Cinderella’s father dies (thus, taking care of that little problem from the story) leaving Cinderella at the mercy of her stepfamily, who now reveal their true colors and treat Cinderella as little more than a servant.

Which brings us to our first “issue” that people cite with this story. Why doesn’t Cinderella just leave, if her family is treating her so badly? Well, let me answer your question with a question: where would she go? It’s indicated that she’s still a child when her father dies, and thus, her stepmother is her legal guardian. When she is old enough to take her life into her own hands, as it were, she’s no longer the daughter of an aristocrat. She’s a commoner, a servant. Her stepmother has basically stripped away whatever legal claim she might have had to her father’s estate. And awful as Lady Tremaine is, she’s still giving Cinderella a place to stay. Yeah, Cinderella has to work, but she has a home, she has food on her plate, and a roof over her head. She’s not going to give that up lightly. Also, when you’ve been raised from childhood to be a servant to your stepmother, you kind of grow up with that inferior mindset into adulthood. Also, legality aside, I do think that Cinderella still sees the place as her father’s house. We’re told that it’s falling into disrepair, because Lady Tremaine cares little for it, and Cinderella has a vested interested in staying.

So for better or worse, Cinderella stays and allows herself to be treated as a servant. But it’s worth noting that this Cinderella is considerably more interesting than her Perrault counterpart, as well as more interesting than the other Disney princesses from this time before being a Disney princess was even a thing. She actually has a very enjoyable personality. Yes, she’s optimistic and kind against all odds, but she can also be vaguely sarcastic, as though she’s on the very edge of talking back at times. Unlike Snow White, who just seemed oblivious, and Aurora, who actually was oblivious, Cinderella seems fully aware that her situation pretty well sucks, but she’s trying to make the best of it that she possibly can. I wouldn’t call her content with her situation. More like resigned. Her attitude seems to be, “I may not like the lot life has dealt me, but there’s not a whole lot I can do about it, so I may as well try to make the best of it.” And unlike Perrault’s Cinderella, who isn’t even able to make her wish and has to have the Fairy Godmother do even that for her, this one does actually try to make her life suck less. It just doesn’t seem to work. She befriends a group of mice, and one of them accidentally gets into trouble. She sings while she works, and Lucifer the Worst Little Demon Cat Ever messes up the floor she was cleaning. She finds a dress to wear to the ball, and . . . but I’m getting ahead of myself.

As I said, Cinderella--being a Disney princess--has animal friends. Birds, who don’t talk, and mice, who sadly do. (And if befriending mice in your house doesn’t force you take a step back and reexamine your life situation, then I don’t know what will.) And this is the one thing Disney did that I’m NOT wild about: the mice. And really, it’s not even the mice themselves. It’s their voices. The mice themselves actually have very enjoyable personalities, with Jaq and Gus taking on an Abbott and Costello style friendship. In a way, this movie is kind of their perspective of the story. Cinderella from the point of view of the mice. I mean, yeah, it’s mostly a bunch of filler material of Tom and Jerry-style antics with Lucifer, but they’re still enjoyable to watch.

So, the plot properly gets going when Cinderella answers the door to a royal official with an invitation to the ball, which she promptly takes up to her stepfamily. And again, to her credit, unlike Perrault’s Cinderella, this Cinderella does actually assert herself here. While her stepsisters are laughing at the idea of her going to the ball, Cinderella points out that EVERY eligible maiden is to attend, and that includes her. Lady Tremaine reluctantly agrees on the condition that she finish her work AND find something to wear . . . which she will, of course, make impossible by keeping her constantly busy.

So, singing mice to the rescue! Cinderella has a dress and an idea of how to fix it up, but she doesn’t have time to do it herself, so . . . the mice do it. This leads to one of the more creative, though also sillier, sequences of the movie where the mice and the birds fix up the dress . . . while singing. (Ugh.) It also leads to another fun sequence with Lucifer, as well as the whole “Leave the sewing to the women,” line that kind of irritates me. But regardless, Cinderella tells her stepfamily that she’s not going, tries to make herself feel better and fails, and then the mice surprise her with her newly updated dress. Delighted, she puts it on, and rushes downstairs to join her stepfamily in going to the ball.

Unfortunately, the mice, in their innocence, used things that the stepsisters had discarded in order to work on Cinderella’s dress, specifically a sash and a necklace of beads, and they use that as an excuse to rip Cinderella’s dress to pieces. The stepfamily leaves Cinderella standing in the ruins of her dress as they go off to the ball without her.

So, yeah . . . SHE FREAKING CRIES. Guess what? So would I! She’s been trying to make the best of a crappy situation for so long, she thought she’d finally have a chance to escape, at least for a little while, and then she’s attacked by her stepsisters -- and I mean physically attacked, that scene is creepy! -- while her stepmother did nothing. This was the breaking point. This was the point when she just couldn’t take it anymore. We’ve all been there, and Cinderella has been through more than most. Cut her some slack, folks.

Anyway, she’s had enough. She’s hit her lowest point. She doesn’t even see the point of dreaming anymore. And that’s when the Godmother shows up. Not when she’s doing her best to dream and hope and do what she can, but when she’s lost all hope and needs someone to give her some. And the Godmother doesn’t just grant her this wish on a whim. This is exactly what Cinderella needs, and not just because the Prince is going to be there. So, the Fairy Godmother is not someone who rescues a helpless damsel in distress, but someone who gives hope to someone who has lost it.

So, the Fairy Godmother sings her song and casts her spell and gives Cinderella her warning, and Cinderella is off to the ball. Now, we’ve been ignoring the prince all this time, so let’s turn to him for a bit.

 . . . Yeah, not much to say about the Prince. He doesn’t show up until the ball, and has little to no personality. But we can talk about the king and the duke for a bit.

So, the King is the one who is so gung-ho to marry his son off, very simply because he wants grandchildren. This seems to be partly practical -- carry on the family line -- and partly personal -- his son has long since grown, and the King misses the child he once was. So really, the King is the real love interest in this story. He’s the one with the schemes and the desire for his son to be married. He’s looking after his own happiness rather than his son’s, but the character is so funny and likable that we don’t really mind how selfish and unreasonable he’s being. The King has a very belabored Grand Duke, who basically does all of his bidding and helps to carry out the King’s schemes.

The Prince, therefore, is bored out of his skull during the ball . . . until Cinderella turns up. He sees her, wandering through the palace lost, and approaches her for a dance. And somehow, Cinderella is unaware that this is the Prince. I mean, okay, he’s dressed like any other nobleman at the ball, but given that everyone’s, you know, looking at him and deferring to him, you’d think it would’ve been obvious. But never mind. They dance, obviously infatuated with each other, while we hear “So, This is Love.” Whether they’re actually in love . . . well, I personally think the question is irrelevant, for reasons I’ll explain later.

The dance the night away, and the clock strikes twelve, and Cinderella is off and running. The Prince makes a few token protests (seriously, three lines and a song, that’s all this guy gets) before he is engulfed by adoring young women and obscured from the remainder of the plot. The Duke, who has been charged with keeping an eye on them and informing the King when the Prince proposes, runs after her instead and sends the palace guards after her, knowing that his neck is on the line. (Again: the duke does all this. Not the Prince.) And of course, Cinderella loses the slipper.

Cinderella’s ensemble changes back to pumpkin, mice, horse, dog, and rags, and since the palace guards aren’t looking for those things, they run right past. Cinderella, far from being disappointed, is actually quite happy, and why shouldn’t she be? She got out of the house, away from her stepfamily, got to go to a royal ball, danced with a handsome guy, basically had a one-night stand without the sex, and even though she has to go back to her old life, this night just might be enough to restore her hope in the future again. And of course, she still has the other glass slipper. And no, it’s never explained why the other things disappear and not this. I guess we have to assume that the Fairy Godmother had enough magic to at least let her keep the shoes.

The scene that follows, where the Duke tells the King that the girl got away, is one of the most hilarious scenes in the movie, as the King goes from being giddy at the thought of his son getting married to flying into a murderous rage when hearing that the Duke let the girl get away, and then back to delighted once he learns that the Prince has said he’ll marry the girl who fits the slipper. So here, the King sees an opportunity. The King isn’t really terribly picky whether the Prince marries the girl he loves or not, he just wants him to marry someone. So since the Prince has, probably in a fit of passionate grief, sworn he’ll marry the girl who fits the glass slipper (most likely meaning the girl who owns the slipper), the King intends to hold him to that exact promise, probably thinking that someone is bound to fit the slipper, it doesn’t matter who. Just so long as she can bear grandchildren.

Next morning, as the stepfamily is suffering a post-ball hangover, the King’s proclamation arrives. The stepmother sees the same opportunity that King did, though from the other end of it. The shoe could easily fit either Anastasia’s or Druzella’s foot as well as anyone’s. Once she explains this to her rather dense daughters, they immediately fly into a frenzy, ordering Cinderella around as usual so they can get ready for the arrival of the Duke.

Cinderella, however, isn’t listening. Because she has caught on as well, and this is one thing I love about this moment of the movie. Cinderella not only realizes that the guy she danced with last night is looking for her, but that he’s the Prince. Cinderella had already given up ever seeing him again, dismissing her feelings as infatuation that she would get over eventually. But this isn’t just any suitor: this is the Prince. This is someone who can finally get Cinderella out of her crummy situation. This is her way out.

And once she realizes that, she STOPS listening to her stepfamily. She doesn’t do what they’re ordering her to do; she hands off the clothes and goes to get ready for the Duke. She essentially extends her middle finger to her stepfamily, and goes off to do her own thing, never thinking for a moment that there’s a damn thing they can do about it, because the Prince is looking for HER, and she knows it. Unfortunately, she completely underestimates her stepmother’s bitchiness, and gets locked in her own tower.

So, it’s not like she does NOTHING here. She knows she’s finally getting her break, and prepares for it. The reason why she is thwarted here and has to be rescued is because she’s locked in a remote tower. She can’t jump out the window, she can’t yell for help, and she can’t break out of the door. There’s literally nothing she can do.

So once again, mice to the rescue! As the stepsisters are comically trying on the tiny slipper on their overly large feet, Jaq and Gus retrieve the key from Lady Tremaine’s pocket and start laboriously moving it up the stairs. And can we just stop and look at how freaking badass these mice are? I mean, did you SEE all those stairs? Damn.

Okay, so they bring the key to the top of the tower, but just as they are about to slide it under the door, Lucifer the Cat That Just Needs to Freaking Die Already, traps Gus and the key under a cup and won’t let him go. And now, we have to look at what Cinderella does next. When the birds are having no luck deterring Lucifer, Cinderella remembers the dog, Bruno. Now, earlier in the movie, Cinderella scolded Bruno for terrorizing Lucifer, even though Lucifer totally deserved it, because they had to learn to live together and get along. But now that Lucifer is directly keeping Cinderella from happiness, she says, “Fuck that shit, get the dog up here so he can get rid of this little spawn of Satan.” The birds do, Lucifer falls out the window, and Cinderella is able to free herself and rush downstairs before the Duke storms out in a huff. Lady Tremaine trips the Duke so that the slipper falls and shatters, but even as the Duke is freaking out, Cinderella just calmly pulls out the other slipper. She already knows that she’s won.

And she has. We don’t know what becomes of the stepfamily, but Cinderella and the Prince get married and go off to make grandchildren for the now ecstatic King, and they all live Happily Ever After.

It’s easy to write this movie off as “Just another Disney movie,” but I think they did a much better job with this movie than people give them credit for. Again, if anything, the problems in this movie have more to do with the source material than how Disney adapted it.

But to the checklist:

Give Cinderella control over her destiny: I would say check. Though this Cinderella isn’t the most active of the Disney princesses, she’s still a hell of a lot more active the Perrault’s Cinderella. This Cinderella is very much an optimist, someone who tries to make the best of things, who does actually make an attempt to go to the ball on her own, who makes a conscious choice to leave her stepfamily for the Prince, and who does what she is able to do to get herself rescued. She receives help only when her own efforts have been thwarted by circumstance and general bitchiness. She’s a lot more interesting and active of a character than I think most people give her credit for

Enhance the role of the Prince: Heh, no. But to be fair, they do enhance the role of the people who ACTUALLY want to see the Prince get married--namely the King and, to a lesser extent, the Duke--and I think that actually does a lot. I think that reinforces the fact that despite the way it’s often romanticized, this is still, at its heart, an arrange political marriage. Yes, the Cinderella and the Prince make googly eyes at each other for a bit, but that’s not where the focus is. The focus is on the King scheming to marry off his son by any means necessary, and Cinderella using the fact that the Prince happens to like her to escape from her family. Not that the two of them don’t like each other, I’m sure they do. But it’s more of an added perk to the marriage than something that the story actually revolves around.

Address the plot transgressions: SOME of them are addressed. Cinderella’s dad dies, so isn’t around to see his daughter being treated horribly. Cinderella doesn’t run away because her life with her stepfamily is really all she has. The Fairy Godmother shows up when Cinderella is no longer capable of being optimistic and hopeful and has pretty much reached the end of a very long rope. And it’s not really the Prince using the shoe to identify Cinderella as it is his father taking advantage of the Prince’s grief and using whatever means he can to marry him off. I might be reading quite a lot into a simple story, but I think the characters are well-defined enough in this movie to fill in a lot of these plot holes, and I think that’s really key in this adaptation. They don’t really address the question of the impracticability of a glass slipper or the fact that the slippers don’t disappear with the rest of the outfit, but given that those are iconic parts of the story, and this is an adaptation rather than a retelling, they couldn’t very well get rid of them. So, I’ll give this three-fourths of a check.

Cinderella might not be the best of the Disney faerie tale movies, and maybe my childhood nostalgia colors a lot of this, but I still think the movie holds up pretty well. For all that it’s romanticized, both by Disney lovers and by Disney detractors, the movie actually manages to keep a fair amount of the romance OUT of the movie, and just focuses on telling a compelling story about a girl who gets handed a bad lot and finally gets her break . . . not unlike the previous Disney princess, as it turns out. Walt Disney loved stories about the underdog, the downtrodden protagonist who finds him or herself and rises above adversity. Really, romance was a secondary concern. Viewed in that way, this story works, and much better than I think a lot of people think that it does.

Cindy Ella by Robin Palmer

Cindy Ella by Robin Palmer

Target Audience: YA/Teen

Summary: Prom fever has infected LA—especially Cindy’s two annoying stepsisters, and her overly Botoxed stepmother. Cindy seems to be the only one immune to it all. But her anti-prom letter in the school newspaper does more to turn Cindy into Queen of the Freaks than close the gap between the popular kids and the rest of the students. Everyone thinks she’s committed social suicide, except for her two best friends, the yoga goddess India and John Hughes–worshipping Malcolm, and shockingly, the most popular senior at Castle Heights High and Cindy’s crush, Adam Silver. Suddenly Cindy starts to think that maybe her social life could have a happily ever after. But there’s still the rest of the school to deal with. With a little bit of help from an unexpected source and a fabulous pair of heels, Cindy realizes that she still has a chance at a happily ever after.

Type of Adaptation: Modernization inspired by Cinderella

Yeah, so, originally, I wanted to review Cinderella: Ninja Warrior by Maureen McGowan for reasons that should be self-explanatory. Cinderella. Ninja Warrior. Why wouldn’t I pick that novel?

But, sadly, it ended up being a Choose Your Own Adventure type of novel, which was going to be super hard to review. So I went with choice number two, because I wanted to do an modernization if there was one. And there was . . . but that “inspired by” . . . well, we’ll get to that.

So, this novel is set in LA, and our protagonist, Cindy Ella, has just committed social suicide. How, you ask? Well, by writing a letter to the editor of her school paper denouncing prom. She tells her classmates that they are brainwashed by society to see prom as a major rite of passage, but that one dance shouldn’t be that all important, and they should stand with her and boycott.

She was expecting to stir up the waters. That’s not what happens. What happens is that everyone hates her and she becomes a social outcast.

Now, I don’t personally remember my proms being taken this seriously, but then, I did go to school in hickville, Ohio rather than Hollywood-obsessed LA, so I’ll take this reaction with a grain of salt.

The only two people who stand by Cindy are her two best friends, Malcolm and India, and their inclusion made my eyebrows quirk because I wasn’t aware that Cinderella had friends, I thought that was kind of the point of her story, but hey, A Cinderella Story made it work, so I’ll let it be for now.

Two of the people who are appalled by Cindy’s actions are Ashley and Brittany, her twin stepsisters, nicknamed “the Clones,” and once they tell their mother what Cindy has done, her stepmother is appalled, too. She’s concerned that Cindy is acting out, and that this article is a sign of her deep-rooted depression following the loss of her mother, and that if left unchecked, Cindy might start self-mutilating or something equally drastic.

Which, correct me if I’m wrong, doesn’t quite seem in keeping with the usual attitude of Cinderella’s stepmother. But at least she’s still practically a servant in her own home. I mean, constantly being asked to babysit her baby brother if she has nothing else going on? That’s totally the equivalent of hard manual labor with no pay and humiliating work conditions.

Yeah, the longer I read this novel, the less it read like Cinderella.

And the plot is one of the most high-school-drama-centric things I’ve read in a long time. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I understand that these are issues that, in the moment, do seem all important to these kids. But coming from the perspective of a 24-year-old with student loans to pay back, a slightly laughable degree in terms of finding a job, and the prospective of a cross-country move in about five months? I find it really hard to connect to a girl whose biggest troubles stem from the fact that she can’t decide who of the three hot guys she has a crush on to focus her attentions on.

Because when you boil this book down to its essentials, that’s what it becomes. Cindy has eyes for Adam Silver, the most popular guy in school, to whom she has never spoken. And then there’s her 23-year-old SAT tutor upon whom she develops an instant crush. And in the third corner, we have BrklnBoy, an online friend she chats with who, if you’ve seen A Cinderella Story or really read a book ever, you will know is actually Adam Silver.

And Cindy’s level of obsession not only about these three guys but also about how she appears and is presented to these guys is really disappointing to encounter when she is supposedly so very anti-Hollywood values.

And that’s the biggest thing for me here – for a girl who wrote such an impassioned letter against prom and its superficiality, she is awfully fixated on Operation Turn Cindy Into a Girl, which, no seriously, is what it’s called. This new crush, her tutor, walks into the scene, and suddenly Cindy is trying makeup and straightening her hair and wearing new clothes and the whole nine yards — exactly what she is supposed to be denouncing.

It doesn’t help that the Cinderella narrative completely disappears for about 150 pages, meaning that this is the only thing left to focus on.

Noah turns out to be gay, by the way. If you didn’t see that coming. He’ll fill the role of the fairy godmother, or as I like to call him, the Fairy God Gay Man. . . . yeah, the title needs work.

So let’s recap briefly. You have a Cinderella figure, except, not really because she isn’t a servant, she doesn’t have an oppressive family, and she has no desire to go to the ball. . . . Where’s our story, again?

Ah, right. Pointless high school drama. Got it.

The Cinderella narrative reemerges . . . ish . . . as prom draws closer and Cindy finds herself abandoned by India and Malcolm, who have both been asked to go, so they will not be standing with her in anti-prom solidarity. She’s complaining about all of this to BrklnBoy, who asks her to be his not-prom date. Thinking it’s a joke to make her feel better, she accepts.

So she’s in for quite a shock when he messages her the day of prom and asks what time he should pick her up. She’s all, “But you live 3000 miles away in NY!” and he’s all “Lol, no. I go to your school. Conveniently, I’m Adam Silver, your crush, and I’m anti-prom, too, isn’t that fantastic?”

All this is paraphrased, of course. In the novel, there’s much more chatspeak and unnecessary abbreviation, which just . . . fueled my irritation. She’s supposed to want to be a journalist more than anything. Doesn’t seem like it.

Sorry. My grammararian is showing.

So she realizes who BrklnBoy is and that he’s actually going to come get her to do something tonight, so what does our self-professed prom-dress-makeup-hating, t-shit-jeans-and-flip-flop-loving high school sophomore do? Does she go out in whatever, just happy to have time to spend with this boy she’s liked for ages and turns out to actually know? Does she say, “hey, I have to babysit my brother, so how about just hanging at my house watching movies?”

Nope! She calls her Gay Godmother Tutor Noah, and they go and BUY HER A FRICKIN’ PROM DRESS AND EXPENSIVE SHOES AND GIVE HER A FREAKIN’ MAKEUP SO THAT SHE CAN BE PRETTY FOR HER CRUSH AND I JUST CAN’TAESDFK;JOAR;LKAV;LKAJRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE!!!!

*deep breath*

I’m okay now. Really. I’m better.

Yeah, okay, they didn’t go to the actual prom, but they might as well have. She still went through the whole ritual, it doesn’t matter that she was freakishly overdressed at a carnival instead of crowded into a gymnasium somewhere, she became what she supposedly hated, and gave into the ritual she literally started the novel speaking out against!

Cindy Ella Gold, give me back your activist card because you’ve lost it.

She also loses a shoe on the ferris wheel. It breaks. And she has to be home by midnight because that’s when her dad and stepmom are getting home, and if they find out that she took their one-year-old son out to a carnival on her date (because yeah, that actually happened), they’ll kill her. Rightly so.

And the next day at school, he returns her shoe, saying, “I think you dropped this last night,” and kisses her in front of the whole school.

Okay. Setting aside all my prom-debate-characterization rage, I have another slight bone to pick.

This novel? It isn’t Cinderella. It isn’t. It tries to be. It throws in a lot of the elements. But a stepfamily and a party and a godmother and a prince and a pair of shoes do not Cinderella make. It’s not about the iconic images, it’s about the situations. Cinderella doesn’t boil down to losing a shoe. It’s a lot more than that.

At its heart, Cinderella is a rags to riches story. This is what you need: a young girl, oppressed in some way, looking desperately for an escape. She finds it in the form of a ball and a prince. She is transformed beyond recognition into the object of desire, but she is lost. A single clue left behind provides the means to find her, and she wins her escape. The rest is just details. Set dressing.

Cindy is not oppressed, not looking for escape, doesn’t want the ball. She’s transformed, but the mystery isn’t there. Her identity is never in question. He never has to search for her. Hell, they never even make it to the party, and that’s kinda key, because it’s not just the prince for whom she is transformed; it’s everyone. And that’s just not there.

There’s a party and a prince and a pair of shoes. But this isn’t Cinderella, despite how hard it tries. And in trying, it just becomes infuriating.

Checklist.

Give Cinderella control of her own destiny? She never needed it. She’s as in control as most 16 year olds. She’s a bit at the beck and call of her stepmother, but she’s never really controlled as such, and her destiny never really comes into play.

Enhance the role of the prince? I found Adam Silver to be shallow and two dimensional, playing at being insightful rather than ever showing any real sort of depth. Sorry.

Address the plot transgressions? Let’s see.

Why does Cindy’s dad allow her to be treated so horribly?  He doesn’t. Because she isn’t. She’s asked to babysit, guys. That’s the extent of it.

Why doesn’t Cindy fight her servitude or leave if she’s being treated so badly?  Again. Babysitting. Occasionally. And having to listen to her stepfamily’s shallow ranting. But that’s all.

Why hasn’t the fairy godmother made an appearance before this point, if she’s charged with Cinderella’s happiness and well being? Not a fairy godmother as such. Just a gay friend who helps her out in a moment of crisis when called on. Her well being was never really his charge.

Anybody going to question glass slippers? No glass slippers. Just designer heels that rip because she wore them on a ferris wheel.

Why don’t the slippers disappear along with the rest of the FG’s gifts? See above.

Why does the prince need the shoe to identify Cinderella, and is it really reasonable to assume that it will? He doesn’t need it to identify her, he just gives it back to her at school.

Guys, if you want a modern Cinderella, watch A Cinderella Story, which I've mentioned about twelve times in this review because this book really did read like a ripoff of that, frankly, much better movie. Yes, I enjoy that movie. Don’t judge me.

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Ugh, I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck. Sorry, sorry, sorry for my extreme suckitude.

Now that that’s out of the way, I swear I am getting back on track with the posting of these. I swear. Anyway, self-degradation done, onto the review.

Target Audience: YA/Teen

Summary: Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl. . . .

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

Type of Adaptation: Futuristic retelling

So, when picking the novels for the month, I really wanted to have at least one with a vastly different setting than vaguely medieval fairy tale land. And with Cinder, I certainly hit that mark.

To start with, let’s place this novel. Our story begins an indeterminate amount of time into Earth’s future, but it’s long enough that the fourth world war is about 150 years in the past and the moon has been colonized long enough that the people there have basically evolved into their own species. So, a while.

Our protagonist, Cinder, is a teenage girl who happens to be the best mechanic in the city, largely because she’s had lots of experience in the field, given that she happens to be a cyborg. She is about 36% machine, as a matter of fact, including her left leg and arm and most of her nervous system. She can’t afford skin grafts to cover her cyborg parts, so she hides them as best she can, behind heavy gloves and long overalls, but they’re always there.

The attitude of this world toward cyborgs is made pretty clear – they’re basically considered second class people, despite the fact that they are, in many cases, people who just had a robotic limb attached after an accident or something similar. Cinder is unusual in her percentage. Most cyborgs are only 5-10% machine.

And what I love about Cinder is that she is still thoroughly human. She has implants controlling her circulation and respiratory system and her chemical releases, but her mind is thoroughly human, and she has control over herself in all but the direst cases.

We start symbolically of Cinderella, watching Cinder replace her too-small robotic foot with one that is actually made for someone her size and not an eleven-year-old, which she was when she was in the accident that killed her parents and nearly killed her.

It’s the atmosphere surrounding Cinder that clues us into the relations of humans toward cyborgs, rather than any exposition, which I appreciate. The exposition we do get is to fill us in on how Cinder is Cinderella, and who her family is.

It turns out, the repair booth she runs in the market belongs to her stepmother and legal guardian, as does all of the money made from Cinder’s work. Cinder’s stepmother Adri inherited Cinder when her husband died, but that husband was not Cinder’s father. He was just a man who had adopted a cyborg orphan from an orphanage for reasons he never made clear to his wife before dying, so now Adri’s stuck with her.

Being a cyborg, and underage, Cinder lacks rights; she is legally owned by Adri, and on top of that, she has no money to speak of. She had to pay for her new foot by sneaking it into another shipment of parts to keep Adri from finding out.

So we learn all this at the start of things, and then a stranger arrives at the booth, with a malfunctioning android that needs to be fixed. Turns out the young stranger is, in fact, Prince Kai, and though he tells Cinder he needs the android for sentimental reasons, her cyborg readout lets her know that he is lying (a handy little tool). But he’s the prince, and she’s a cyborg (though he doesn’t know that), so she doesn’t press him.

He leaves the android with her and heads off, and shortly after he does, a plague outbreak happens in the middle of the market.

Because in this futuristic world with five major Earthen empires and pretty solid world peace, the biggest threat to Earth (apart from Lunar, the moon country that is apparently crazy and magical) is letumosis, a serious plague without cure or antidote, that passes in an unknown way from person to person. They’ve gotten good at shutting down outbreaks, but hundreds of people are still dying every day.

Cinder makes it home from the market, lying to her stepmother about how close it was to their booth. She finds Adri and Pearl, her older stepsister, completely engrossed in news about the upcoming Festival, which is being held despite the fact that the emperor is sick with letumosis. Adri is spending an insane amount of money on dresses for her girls, and true to the Grimm version of the tale, she promises Cinder that she can go if she completes all her chores.

Cinder sees through this lie, knowing that Adri will never run out of chores for her to do, but that’s okay, since she doesn’t really have any interest in going to the ball anyway. Or at least that’s what she tells Peony, the nice stepsister she’s actually friends with, another throwback to the Grimm version of this tale. But the truth is, well, the truth is complicated.

And it gets further complicated when Cinder allows Peony to come along with her to a junkyard to look for parts to fix the hovercar. In the junkyard, she stumbles onto a very, very old car that, as she discovers on closer inspection, isn’t a hovercar at all, but a gasoline car, which fell out of use decades ago. It’s a hideous orange and is described as reminding Cinder of a rotting pumpkin (a description which made me smile), and it’s currently inhabited by rats, but it’s presence sparks an idea in Cinder. That maybe, she can try and fix it up in her spare time, and maybe someday she can escape.

But reality is brought crashing back down when Peony starts to display plague symptoms. Cinder has to report her; if she doesn’t, Peony will infect hundreds. But it’s still the hardest thing Cinder has had to do. And she is fully expecting to be hauled away along with her by the med-droids, but they test her blood and declare her clean, despite the fact that she has been right next to Peony all day.

Cinder rushes home to tell Adri, but Adri already knows. The house is full of med-droids, and Adri is blaming Cinder. It isn’t Cinder’s fault, but that’s never stopped Adri before, and this time, Adri is entirely done. Cinder has become more trouble than she’s worth, so Adri has volunteered her to be a test subject for a letumosis cure – something that cyborgs never return from. Cinder does not go quietly.

We alternate throughout the book between Cinder and Prince Kai, and through Prince Kai, we get the world politics, which I won’t get too far into, as they’re less about Cinderella and more about setting up the world and the sequels which are to come. But we do know that the Eastern Empire is in trouble. The emperor is sick with letumosis and has days to live. Kai is going to be emperor very soon unless a cure is found. He’s seventeen, watching his father die, and having to prepare to inherit all the troubles of his empire. Also, he just met a girl he can’t get out of his head.

We get a background for the Lunar queen during Kai’s sections as well, and it’s clear that she is a nasty piece of work. We learn that she killed her sister for her throne, forced her stepdaughter to mutilate her own face so she wouldn’t grow to be prettier than the queen, and burned her niece, the rightful heir, to death. Though there are conspiracy theorists who believe the young princess might still be alive.

And that was the point where I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Because when you have an orphaned main character and a supposedly killed rightful heir to a throne, there’s usually only one way that ends, and I really didn’t want the novel to go that route, but unfortunately, what I saw coming a mile away was, in fact, the “plot twist” – Cinder is actually the super secret princess in disguise, and she doesn’t even know it!!!

And don’t get me wrong, this is still a good novel that I enjoyed. I was just a bit disappointed that Meyer went the cliched orphaned princess route in the end. But let’s just continue.

Anyway, the Queen is just a nasty woman, and she wants to be an Earthen empress. She was trying to get the old emperor to agree to marry her, but now that he’s dying, she’ll settle for Kai, whether Kai wants it or not.

Back to Cinder, she’s being treated a bit differently from the other cyborg plague test subjects, largely because she is apparently immune to letumosis, which is unheard of. She hears from the healer in charge that the only people ever known to be immune are Lunars, and it’s his suspicion that she is a Lunar refugee with a stolen ID chip implanted in her when she became a cyborg.

Cinder really doesn’t want this to be true, especially given that Lunars are hated even more than cyborgs because they have the ability to manipulate a person’s bioelectric energy, essentially brainwashing people into believing whatever they want. Queen Levana can do it; it’s how she controls all the Lunars and why everyone on Earth is afraid of her.

So for Cinder to be both a cyborg and Lunar paints basically the worst possible future ever.

And it doesn’t help that Kai knows neither of these things, is fixated on her, and keeps trying to convince her to go to the ball with him. If he has a personal guest, then Queen Levana, who is coming to Earth for a “diplomatic” visit, might be staved off.

But the healer who knows she’s Lunar and cyborg (and is a super good guy for helping keep these things from Kai), warns her that Levana cannot know she is here. Levana will recognize another Lunar, and things will be bad.

Obviously, though, for the sake of story, she has to be noticed, and noticed she is, when dropping off the Prince’s newly fixed android. The droid was purposefully corrupted so that some unknown someone could tap into what Kai was investigating, which happened to be the rumors that the Lunar princess is alive somewhere.

Moving along and skipping all the politic stuff to get to the Cinderella stuff, both the emperor and Peony die from the plague, despite Cinder’s blood being used to try and create an antidote. Unbeknownst to Adri, Cinder has been getting paid for the use of her blood into a secret, separate account, and she has been using the money to fix up the car in the junkyard and buy gasoline for it. Her plan is to run on the night of the Festival, escape to Europe and start a new life for herself.

But then she intercepts a message meant for Kai from the Lunar surface - a warning. Queen Levana knows the research he’s been doing. He has to be warned, so he can protect himself, and Cinder is the only one who can get the message to him – at the festival.

Luckily, she has the gown Peony was going to wear, and silk gloves that were given to her by Kai in case she changed her mind about the ball, and even though both are stained and wrinkled and smudged, they’re all she has, and they’re better than showing up in her mechanics close.

She’s also walking on the too-small foot once more because Adri made her give up her new one when she discovered Cinder had bought it without approval. But none of that can be helped.

And she’s panicking a bit because her ID chip probably isn’t going to scan her into the ball, and she’s thinking fast to find an excuse that will get her through the gate, but it turns out Kai put her on the list as his personal guest, just in case, so she makes it through the doors. And then she’s announced, which was not part of her plan.

Kai is at her side in an instant, thrilled to see her – until he hears what she has to say. But before he can be convinced, Levana is there, exposing Cinder as a Lunar fugitive and a cyborg, and when Cinder’s too small foot is wrenched off, she can’t exactly deny it. And the reaction is just what she expected. Kai is confused and hurt, but it’s Levana who forces him to do what happens next.

Housing a Lunar fugitive is grounds for war, and unless Kai agrees to have Cinder executed, the Lunar army will attack. So he has no choice. She’s taken away to the dungeon, and we end this book with the healer, who visits Cinder, reveals that he, also, is a Lunar fugitive, and that she, surprise surprise, is the long lost princess, and that she must escape the dungeon at all costs.

We’re setting up a sequel here, so that’s where we end.

Though I am disappointed by the predictable plot twist, I did enjoy this story, and the reworking of Cinderella into a futuristic, sci-fi setting. It reminded me a lot of Sharon Shinn’s Jenna Starborn, which does a similar thing with Jane Eyre. But this is a unique reimagining of a classic tale, and that’s hard to do these days. So let’s look at the checklist.

Give Cinderella some control of her own destiny? Entirely. Cinder is constantly arguing and making her own choices, putting her foot down, and doing everything in her power to negotiate and control her own life. She doesn’t always succeed, but she sure as hell tries.

Enhance the role of the prince? I love Kai because his issues and struggles feel so real. He’s in a dangerous place, and while he knows it, he still is only 17, and that is balanced very well. His lot is entirely unfair and he knows it, but there’s little he can do about it. He’s flawed, but a great character all the same, and I like that he falls for Cinder slowly and for more than just her looks. In the end, he doesn’t reject and imprison her because she’s a cyborg and a Lunar. He doesn’t have a choice, which she recognizes, and he’s more hurt that she didn’t feel she could trust him with the truth, and that was lovely to read.

Address the plot transgressions? Let’s see.

Why does Cindy’s dad allow her to be treated so horribly?  He doesn’t. He’s dead. And he wasn’t her dad in the first place. Rather, he was the first person to identify Cinder as the lost princess, and he was protecting her the only way he could.  

Why doesn’t Cindy fight her servitude or leave if she’s being treated so badly?  She tries, holy hell does she try. But she’s fighting an unfair system every step of the way, and it’s stronger than she is.

Why hasn’t the fairy godmother made an appearance before this point, if she’s charged with Cinderella’s happiness and well being? There is no FG as such; rather, Cinder is in charge of her own future, getting to the ball with transportation and gown under her own power. The Healer is the closest to a FG that we get, and once he finds Cinder, he helps as much as he’s able without getting caught himself.

Anybody going to question glass slippers? No glass slippers, just a too-small cybernetic foot.

Why don’t the slippers disappear along with the rest of the FG’s gifts? See above.

Why does the prince need the shoe to identify Cinderella, and is it really reasonable to assume that it will? The foot less identifies Cinder as Cinder and more serves as proof that she’s a cyborg, but I have a feeling it’s going to become more important in the sequel. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait til next month to see.

There will be another review posted today because I swear I am getting back on track. I swear!

Princess of Glass by Jessica Day George

I have gotten so bad at uploading these on time. I'm sorry, really, and I'm gonna try to improve. Life's just been on overload lately. Anyway, here it is, five days late. But enjoy!

Princess of Glass by Jessica Day George

Target Audience: YA/Teen

Summary: Hoping to escape the troubles in her kingdom, Princess Poppy reluctantly agrees to take part in a royal exchange program, whereby young princes and princesses travel to each other's countries in the name of better political alliances--and potential marriages. It's got the makings of a fairy tale--until a hapless servant named Eleanor is tricked by a vengeful fairy godmother into competing with Poppy for the eligible prince. Ballgowns, cinders, and enchanted glass slippers fly in this romantic and action-packed happily-ever-after quest from an author with a flair for embroidering tales in her own delightful way.

Type of Adaptation: Retelling

So it should come as no surprise to anyone by now that I love Jessica Day George. I think I’ve stated before that she can do no wrong in my book? Yeah, she can do no wrong.

Princess of Glass is a companion novel to Princess of the Midnight Ball. It’s not strictly necessary to have read that one first, but it does help to know the background info – PotMB was Twelve Dancing Princesses retold. Rose and Galen, our protagonists from that book, have married and are set to become king and queen of Westfalin some day. But the rest of the countries in Ionia are less certain of their future, and tension is pretty high.

Remember how all the princes die in TDP? Well, in PotMB, those deaths were accidental rather than deliberate, but it still means that most countries lost at least one heir, and while there is peace, it is tentative, and so the rulers of the Ionian kingdoms come up with a plan – a giant child-swap. Each country will send some of its children to other countries to “foster friendships and connections,” which in this case is obvious code for “giant marital scheme.”

The kids all see through this, of course, but they recognize how important it is, particularly the princesses of Westfalin, who are indirectly responsible for the tension currently in Ionia.

In this novel, we follow Poppy, kickass middle princess from PotMB, as she travels to Breton (Ionia’s equivalent of England), the country her mother was from. She stays with the Seadown family, her mother’s cousin, though apart from the Seadowns, Poppy is not terribly well received for a few reasons. One, she’s a highly unorthodox princess who knits and plays cards and curses. Two, everyone believes that she’s cursed or a witch or something like that, given the mysterious circumstances surrounding her and her sisters. And three, Poppy has flat out refused to dance. At all.

Also present in Breton for the Great Marriage Swap is the Prince from Danelaw, named Christian. And King Rupert of Breton is much more interested in him, because he desires a tie to Danelaw and its navy. He’s very blunt, asking Christian point blank if he has any plan to marry one of his daughters, but given that the girls in question are nine and seven and Christian is seventeen, he declines. And so, King Rupert is determined to marry Christian off to a Bretoner noble woman, because then the tie to the country will still exist.

And what George has done here is brilliant. This is a unique but compelling reason behind throwing the balls to marry the prince. King Rupert can’t force Christian to marry a Bretoner girl, but he can sure as hell try, by throwing every eligible girl in the kingdom at him, repeatedly, at three separate balls to take place over the summer.

Now, Poppy is our focal character in this, which makes sense; she is, after all, the familiar face, and this is her story. But she is not our Cinderella. No. That distinction belongs to Eleanora, who now goes by the name of Ellen, as Ellen sounds more common. See, Eleanora’s father was a minor nobleman, and they were pretty well to do until he started gambling. He ended up losing all their money, and then he died, and Eleanora was left utterly destitute. He had no fortune left to give her, and she had no other family. The only option available was to go into service.

No other family? I hear some of you saying. Then how can she be Cinderella? Where is the stepmother? Where are the stepsisters? Simple: That’s the role that’s been given to Poppy.

This is brilliant. Really. Poppy is staying with a family with a girl her age, Marianne. And while they’re not “evil stepsisters” exactly as we know them through Cinderella, they do fill that role in Ellen’s life. They are the girls Ellen is forced to wait on. And while they don’t go out of their way to make her life miserable, they are dismissive of her and short-tempered on more than one occasion.

Because Ellen is a horrible servant. And unlike Diane Zahler’s princesses-turned-servants, it’s not because she’s inherently bad at it – in this case, it’s spell, though we don’t find that out until later. But Ellen can’t do anything right. She spills the tea trays and burns the ironing and drops laundry in the coal scuttles, and Poppy and Marianne have little patience for her because they think she is doing those things on purpose.

And boom. Instant stepsisters. But what I love so much about this dynamic is how our Cinderella is characterized. Because in this version, she’s not the sweet, innocent child who remains gentle and kind despite what love throws at her. No, Ellen/Eleanora is constantly aware of what she lost. She’s angry about it. She hates it. She hates that being a servant is all she can do with her life now, and she hates that she’s bad at being a servant. She is lonely and miserable and she knows exactly how unfair her life is.

Which is how and why the Corley is able to use her. The Corley is the big bad of this novel, and my favorite part? The Corley is the fairy godmother. Gah, I love this author so much!

Because she’s the freakin’ fairy godmother! The one who rescues Cinderella and gives her her heart’s desire! Except that in this version, she’s a dark spirit out for revenge, preying on a girl full of bitterness and resentment, planting in her ear the seed of what she “wants.” Because the Corley needs a girl who she assists to marry a prince of the Danelaw for reasons that I won’t try to summarize because they’re complicated and not directly related to Cinderella. Ellen is that girl, and Christian is that prince.

And so, as the balls approach, the Corley helps Ellen. She gets her a gown (that copies Poppy’s), and a way to the ball, and then, the Corley pours molten glass onto Ellen’s feet and shapes it into slippers, magical, flexible slippers that will move with Ellen as she dances, but if she fails to return before midnight, the glass will harden and that will be bad. And then, decked out in an enchantment that Ellen thinks is just keeping her unrecognizable but is actually making every young man completely lose his head over her, she heads out to the ball.

Back to Poppy, as this is Poppy’s tale, she recognizes an enchantment when she sees one. I mean, after all she’s been through, it’d be hard not to. And at Galen’s request, she carries charms against enchantments on her person at all times, and so she alone (along with Ellen’s eventual actual love interest, Richard) is unaffected by the Corley’s spell. She recognizes Ellen as Ellen, even when no one else does, and she knows something bad is going on.

With Richard’s help, and their joint knowledge of protective enchantments, they come up with a way to break through the Corley’s spell — sort of. Poppy knits spelled bracelets and Richard brews a potion, but the potion has to be drunk every day, and Poppy has to convince the enchanted people to wear the things, and it’s far harder with the men than the women, and Christian is the hardest of all.

Given that Christian is the focus of the spell, that makes sense. And yet, he fights against it, too, without fully realizing it. He fights against it when “Lady Ella” is out of his sight because, and I know you’ll all be shocked to hear this, he’s fallen in love with Poppy. Which means the enchantment has to work twice as hard on him, and it doesn’t help that Poppy and Ellen look very similar, and she shows up to the first ball in a replica of Poppy’s dress. Christian actually approaches her initially thinking she is Poppy, because he wants to convince Poppy to dance.

Now, the balls are spread out over a month in this story, which is nice because it actually gives things a chance to happen realistically. And I love watching Poppy’s progression as she slowly learns the truth about Ellen – that she’s not being a bad servant on purpose, that she can’t control it, and finally, when she goes to confront her after the second ball, that she’s being controlled and manipulated as much as everyone else.

What convinces Ellen to tell Poppy the whole story? Why, the fact that her feet have turned to glass. Yeah, she didn’t quite get back in time after that second ball. And so she’s freaking out because the deal is, Christian has to propose to her before the end of the third ball, and if he doesn’t, very very bad things will happen. She went along with the plan initially because she wanted out of this life, and a prince was as good as anyone. But now she’s miserable, and what’s more, she doesn’t love Christian, she loves Richard, and she knows that Christian doesn’t love her, either. She doesn’t want to marry him, doesn’t want to go through with the Corley’s plan. But this isn’t exactly something you can just back out of.

It’s Christian who comes up with the plan in a moment where he’s free of the Corley’s curse, more or less. Ellen can’t dance at the final ball — her feet are glass; it’s not going to happen. So they have to trick the Corley by sending someone down in Ellen’s place. Someone who can wear a mask (because the ball is a masquerade) and look very like Ellen. Someone like Poppy.

Poppy agrees. She’s not terribly happy about it, but she knows it has to be done. So she goes through the fireplace to the Corley’s lair, acting like Ellen, and she thinks the ruse works. She gets the glass poured on her feet, and she’s decked out like a peacock, and she goes to the ball and dances with Christian, and then just before midnight, he proposes to “Ella,” and they think that maybe it’s worked.

Until they are thoroughly disabused of that notion when Poppy is physically pulled by magic from the room and from Christian to the carriage waiting outside. Poppy fights the magic as best she can, and while she’s no match for it, she does fight the shoes off her feet before being snatched away to the Corley’s lair.

And she and Ellen are there together because the Corley knew. And the whole entourage of people working to break this enchantment – Lord Seadown, Lady Seadown, Marianne and her beau Dickon, Richard, and Christian — likewise make their way to the Corley’s lair, where the enchantment is much stronger than it has ever been.

Christian finds Ellen and Poppy dressed identically, and he has to choose his true love, and they cannot speak. All he has is the slipper to go on. But the first girl, her feet aren’t quit right – they’re made of glass. So it has to be the second. He slips the shoe onto Poppy’s foot, and other things happen simultaneously to defeat the Corley, and it’s happily ever after for all parties involved.

I adore Jessica Day George and the way she tells stories. This is the first real adaptation she’s done; her other two fairy tale novels were on lesser known stories, so she stayed pretty close to the original, just fleshing them out. But with Cinderella, she really had her chance to put her own spin on it, and what a marvelous spin it turned out to be.

Checklist.

Give Cinderella some control of her own destiny? Yes. Eleanora wanted her out, in the beginning. She was desperate for it. The Corley preyed on that, but Ellen did also choose it, and choose to go along with it, and when she decided she wanted out, she made that decision on her own as well, choosing someone other than the prince, choosing to trust people to help. She shaped her own destiny, absolutely.

Enhance the role of the prince? I love that Christian, so befuddled by enchantment that he can hardly see or speak straight, is still the one to come up with a possible solution, because what seems so obvious to him has escaped everyone else’s notice – the fact that Ellen and Poppy look so very similar. The poor guy spends all his time under a curse, just about, but he fights it so hard, and he’s a wonderful character. So check.

Address the plot transgressions? Let’s see.

Why does Cindy’s dad allow her to be treated so horribly?  He doesn’t. He’s dead.     

Why doesn’t Cindy fight her servitude or leave if she’s being treated so badly?  Servitude is literally the only option left for her. She’s not even a servant in her old house because that’s even gone. She does not have another choice.

Why hasn’t the fairy godmother made an appearance before this point, if she’s charged with Cinderella’s happiness and well being? She’s not actually Ellen’s godmother, she just discovered this lonely, miserable girl and took advantage. FG as bad guy. I love it.

Anybody going to question glass slippers? They’re beautiful but horrifying in this version. Molten glass poured over my feet? I don’t care if it’s magical glass — no thank you! And I love that Poppy gets to tell Christian how horribly painful the shoes are.

Why don’t the slippers disappear along with the rest of the FG’s gifts? Not specifically explained, but the whole ensemble isn’t magical in that way, really. It’s not a glamour that will fade, precisely.

Why does the prince need the shoe to identify Cinderella, and is it really reasonable to assume that it will? This isn’t just a case of having the same size feet. It’s that the shoe was literally molded to a foot, so yeah, only gonna fit her. Also, it was more the feet identifying the girl than the shoe. There were only two, and even in his mind-fuddle, Christian knew the girl he loved didn’t have feet of glass.

Strong adaptation all the way around. Love it, absolutely love it.

Just Ella by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Just Ella by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Target Audience: Middle Grade/YA

Summary: You've heard the fairytale: a glass slipper, Prince Charming, happily ever after...

Welcome to reality: royal genealogy lessons, needlepoint, acting like "a proper lady," and — worst of all — a prince who is not the least bit interesting, and certainly not charming.

As soon-to-be princess Ella deals with her newfound status, she comes to realize she is not "your majesty" material. But breaking off a royal engagement is no easy feat, especially when you're crushing on another boy in the palace.... For Ella to escape, it will take intelligence, determination, and spunk — and no ladylike behavior allowed.

Type of Adaptation: Continuation

The first time I read this book, it was like a lightbulb going on in my head – here was someone putting voice and thought and explanation to all the questions I hadn’t known I’d had about Perrault’s Cinderella. Here was a Cinderella who asked all the questions I wanted her to ask, came to the conclusions I wanted her to come to, and grew in the ways I so want this character to grow.

But obviously, she can’t start there. No, Ella Brown in this book starts out as Princess Cynthiana Eleanora, newly transformed princess by virtue of being the prince’s chosen wife. Yes, we start a few weeks after the ball, with our Cinderella blissfully happy in her palace with her prince – well, mostly. Truth is, she is kinda tired of learning what is “proper” behavior for a princess, the endless lessons in deportment and etiquette and propr behavior, and the only thing that really keeps her going is the evenings she is allowed to spend, chaperoned of course, with Prince Charming.

It’s the fact that she’s allowed to see him so infrequently and that they’re always being watched that make the evenings so awkward and long. Has to be.

As the book progresses, we see Ella start to wonder if all this is really worth winning the prince. But she is so in love with him that she convinces herself it is and pushes on. And then one of her teachers is taken ill, and replaced with his young son, Jed. In Jed, Ella finds something she didn’t know she was missing – a confidant. Jed knows at once that Ella’s cover story – being a princess from a faraway land who got to the ball in secret — isn’t true, using fairly simple reasoning with common knowledge that make me wonder after the intelligence of the people in charge who thought it would be a good story. But then I remember what fairy tale I’m reading, and I’m less surprised.

But Jed alludes to some mysterious story that Ella has heard her maids allude to as well, references that make no sense to her, about magic and fairy godmothers, and it is from Jed that she finally hears the rumor that is flying around the kingdom. And it’s the story we all know, fairy godmothers, transforming pumpkins, glass slippers, magical help, all of it.

And Ella is outraged by it. Because she is appalled at the notion that the wave of a wand has taken the place of the weeks of work and planning she put into getting to the ball. So she tells Jed the true story.

Her father remarried a woman who won his heart by pretending to love his books and scholarly pursuits until they were married, when she revealed her true colors. Then he was killed in the war, caught between sides in an accidental skirmish. Ella became the maid because she had no other choice, and because she couldn’t bear to leave the home she’d shared with her father.

Her stepmother and two stepsisters were awful, but she got her own back in small, subtle ways – or at least, she thought she was. But it wasn’t until she heard about the ball and immediately knew she wouldn’t go that she started to realize just how much they had taken away from her. Because they had put her in a place where she honestly felt she didn’t deserve the chance to go, despite her invitation.

That’s what lights the fire in her. That’s what drives her to get to that ball at any cost. It’s a small thing, but she needs it if she wants to prove that her stepfamily doesn’t own her.

She does all the work herself – she works late into the night altering her mother’s wedding dress to fit. She plots out the course she’ll need to walk to the palace and how long it will take. She overhears the glassblower boasting that he can make anything anyone can name, and takes the opportunity to get shoes the only way she can, by naming glass shoes she can walk in without them breaking. If he wins the bet, she gets to keep the shoes.

No fairy godmother, no magic coach. She does it all herself. She makes it to the ball, and she’s sent in to meet the prince, who is captivated by her beauty. But she can only stay til midnight because she has to get home in time to clean the cellar, and as she runs out, she feels one of the shoes start to break, so she leaves it behind. The prince finds her the next day, and whisks her away. That’s the real story.

What Ella doesn’t know and doesn’t find out until later is that she was chosen purely because of her beauty. The law of the land is that the Charmings must produce beautiful children, and the ball was arranged because none of the noble girls met the requirements. So the plan was to find a non noble girl and teach her to be a princess.

The more Ella learns, the more she starts to realize how trapped she is. She’s not allowed to have any ideas, she’s not allowed to hold opinions, she’s being prepared to be a dressed up doll for the rest of her life. When we add the realization that she doesn’t really love the prince, that in fact, he’s kind of an idiot, not someone with whom she can hold anything resembling a conversation? Well, Ella’s in a bit of a pickle.

She foolishly believes that if she just tells Charming she doesn’t want to marry him, that will be that. But it isn’t. Instead, the declaration gets her thrown into the dungeon, Charming and his advisors determined to break her spirit so she’ll agree to the wedding. But this is Ella, and she’s not going to let that happen. She manages to escape the palace, figuring out in the meantime just what she wants her life to look like.

The end is, obviously, more complicated than that, but that’s the bit that relates most closely to Cinderella, so that’s as much detail as I’m going to go into.

I love this book. It’s a pretty simple idea, sure, but it’s executed really well. Haddix stepped outside her usual genre with this one, and personally, I’m really glad that she did. So, checklist.

Give Cinderella some control of her destiny? Try exclusive control. Ella Brown is kickass. She made her way to the ball entirely on her own, she broke free of the prince, she escaped the life that others would have forced her into time and time again. Absolutely check.

Enhance the role of the prince? Not exactly, but because of how they handled his character, I’m giving the point anyway. Instead of offering an explanation for why he appears so dumb in the original, Haddix just made him legitimately stupid and thoughtless and completely directed by advisors, and for the story she was writing, that works really well. I like that this Prince Charming really wasn’t very. That was a nice touch.

Address the plot transgressions? Let’s see.

Why does Cindy’s dad allow her to be treated so horribly?  He doesn’t. He’s dead.      

Why doesn’t Cindy fight her servitude or leave if she’s being treated so badly?  She stays out of loyalty to her father’s memory.

Why hasn’t the fairy godmother made an appearance before this point, if she’s charged with Cinderella’s happiness and well being? There is no fairy godmother; Ella did it all on her own.

Anybody going to question glass slippers? It’s made very clear that the glass slippers are incredibly uncomfortable and not first choice of footwear, but you do what you gotta do.

Why don’t the slippers disappear along with the rest of the FG’s gifts? Not magical, therefore no issue.

Why does the prince need the shoe to identify Cinderella, and is it really reasonable to assume that it will? Because he’s an idiot. Plain and simple.

Top notch adaptation. Loved this book as a kid, and I still love it now.

Cinderella (According to Cassie)

Cinderella (According to Cassie)

So, basically, there’s this girl, and who am I kidding? Unless you’ve lived under a rock for most of your life or are secretly a wizard (in which case, nicely done accessing the Internet. I’m flattered it’s my blog you’ve turned to. Let’s talk about Hogwarts, as I’ve got some important questions), then you know the story of Cinderella. It’s only the most ubiquitous fairy tale in the entire world. Seriously, you can’t swing a dead cat through the cultures of the world without hitting a Cinderella variant (...sorry, that metaphor got away from me).

But honestly, this story is everywhere. Everybody’s got a tale of a young orphaned girl forced into servitude by a stepmother, who goes to a party, falls in love with a prince, loses something of value, and gets the guy in the end. It’s the typical rags-to-riches deal we all want to happen to us.

But it makes reading adaptations a slightly sticky endeavor. Because there are just so many! So where do you focus?

Well, the most well known is Perrault, with his glass slipper and pumpkin turning into a coach and fairy godmother. I’m not sure why this is the most well known, but we’ll get to that. Because I know this to be the version that will immediately pop to mind for most, it’s the one I’ll focus on in the ‘According to Cassie’ vein, but I’m also going to address some others in there as well.

So despite the fact that you all know it, here we go.

Basically, there’s this girl and it used to be she had a normal happy life with her mother and father, but then the mother died and the father grew despondent. The time frame is ambiguous, as is the father’s relationship with his daughter after her mother’s death.

But after a few years have gone by, the father remarries to an absolutely awful woman with two awful daughters (occasionally, one daughter is less awful, but never less awful enough to actually stand up for her new stepsister). It’s never made clear just why the father marries this woman, but that’s not even the most problematic thing about Dad in this story. Oftentimes, after the marriage, the father dies, which is unfortunate for his daughter, but miles better than the other versions of the story where he doesn’t die and is somehow completely okay with what happens next.

And what happens next is that the stepmother, threatened by Ella’s beauty (because she’s not actually named Cinderella, guys, that would be a nickname. You know. Cinder. As in ashes. From a fireplace? Nickname), forces her to become a servant in her own home, waiting on her and her daughters hand and foot, doing all the household work on her own. She’s basically a slave.

Now, okay. I know that young girls in fairy tale land don’t typically have a lot of power. But one of the questions I have always had at this point is why doesn’t she fight back? Stepmother says, “You’re a servant now,” what is it that keeps Cinderella from saying, “bitch, I don’t think so.”? There are many possible answers to this question, but the original Perrault doesn’t offer any of them. She just accepts her servitude, no fight given. It’s even worse when her father is still alive because how is that something he allows?

Anyway, her work in the household earns her the name of Cinderella, given to her by the nicer stepsister, since it’s kinder than what the other calls her – Cinderwench. Thank God for small blessings, I guess? And this is how life continues for many years.

And then the King announces a ball, to be given in honor of the prince’s twenty-first birthday, and all the eligible maidens in the kingdom are invited. I’m going to say that again, in case you missed the implications. The King is so desperate to marry off his son that he is inviting every single solitary female in his kingdom, be she noble, farmgirl, or servant, to come and be considered as the kingdom’s future queen. Yeah, that’s not something that usually happens when looking to marry off a prince, and in the tonnage of issues this fairy tale has going against it, I feel like this one gets lost a bit.

Well, the stepsisters are all excited to go to a royal ball, but Cinderella knows she can’t because they’d never let her and she doesn’t have anything to wear. So, on the day of the ball, she gets them ready and out the door, and then she falls down sobbing at the unfairness of it all.

And just when she’s at her lowest point, who should appear but her fairy godmother! And why Cinderella’s first question isn’t “Why the hell haven’t you shown up before now???” isn’t addressed. Rather, Cinderella is sobbing too hard to even answer the FG’s question as to what the matter is. All she gets out is “I wish, oh I wish—” to which the FG replies, “You wish you could go to the ball?” And Cindy nods an affirmative.

Again, I’m gonna highlight this just in case you missed it: Perrault’s Cinderella has so little agency that she cannot even speak what she wants for her life for herself. She is so helpless that she honestly cannot even get the words out; they have to be supplied for her, just like everything else that’s about to happen. The FG waves her wand and produces a ball gown, glass slippers, a coach to the palace, and people to drive it. Cinderella does nothing. I mean, she suggests using rats as coachmen, but that’s about it. The rest? Just handed to her, presenting us with the message: if you’re sweet and docile and helpless enough, someone will eventually come along and fix your problems for you. But then, it’s Perrault, so we shouldn’t really be surprised.

Anyway, she has to promise to be home by midnight, because that’s when the magic will fade, and she does, and she goes to the ball, and every is struck by her loveliness, and the prince (of course) falls in love with her immediately and they dance all night together. So transformed is she by a bath and fancy clothes that she can sit next to her stepsisters and chat with them, and they have no idea who she is!

And then the clock strikes quarter to midnight, and off Cindy goes, making it home just as the magic fades. We are told that she has a good time when her stepfamily gets home, making them recount the mysterious maiden in all possible detail, along with telling how much the prince admired her, which, I dunno, doesn’t exactly sound to me like Cinderella is as sweet as she’s supposed to be.

Well, this scenario plays out twice more at the last two nights of the ball, but on the final night, Cindy stays so late that she has to run right at midnight, and she loses one of her glass slippers on the steps as she flees. The prince finds it and declares that he will marry the maiden whose foot fits the slipper!

. . . Okay. Lets talk about this for a minute. First of all, you’ve danced with this girl all night for three nights in a row and are head over heels in love with her, and yet it’s her foot and not her face or her voice or a series of questions about what you talked of in three nights that you’re going to use to identify her? Really?

And secondly, did it never cross your mind, princey boy, that there might be some girl in your entire, massive kingdom, who might just have the same size feet as the mysterious girl you danced with? If this is your grand plan to find the love of your life, I can easily see why your father was having such a hard time finding a bride for you. Because you’re an idiot.

See, here’s how this should have gone down. You announce that you’re going to marry the girl you danced with, not the girl who fits the slipper, first off. Then you conduct your house to house search and use the memory of what she looks like and sounds like and what you talked about to find her. And then if you still have doubts that she is who you fell in love with, you say, “Hey, you left something behind on that last night. What was it?” And you will have not announced to the world that you found this glass slipper.

Seriously.

But our prince is not that sensible, and so this is how the story goes. Somehow, no other girl in the entire kingdom has the same size feet as Cinderella, and so when the steward (yes, steward; no, the prince doesn’t even go out and find his own damn girlfriend) puts it on her foot and it fits, they know that, gasp! They’ve found their mysterious maiden! And no one seems to have a problem with the fact that she’s a servant and a commoner!

She also happens to have the second glass slipper on her, which helps.

Except, wait a gosh-darn second here. Didn’t the FG tell Cindy that she had to be home by midnight because the magic would fade and her dress and coach and everything would disappear? So how is it that these shoes are still around?

You know what? I don’t even care anymore. Shoe fits, Cindy marries Prince, happily ever after, yada yada yada.

Thoughts on the original? Whoo boy, I hope you have some time.

Perrault’s Cinderella is ridiculous. Hands down, plain and simple, straight up nonsensically ridiculous. I mean, it’s relatively common knowledge that the reason Cindy gets a glass slipper in this version is because of a mistranslation. It was a fur slipper, but the two words in old German got confused, and she ended up with one made of glass instead, and nobody thought that was strange.

And in looking at this story, and I mean really looking at it, I’m forced to wonder if that was the only thing that got mistranslated. Because there is so much of this story that just plain does not make sense. But I think what bothers me most is that, out of all the available Cinderella stories in the world, this is the one that we know. This is the one that has stuck.

Personally, I prefer the Grimm version, because in that one, Cindy actually does something! She plants a tree at her mother’s grave, and when the ball is announced, she goes to that tree and asks her mothers spirit for a miracle. It’s a small change, maybe, but a substantial one. A magical guardian doesn’t just appear and offer her an out; Cinderella goes and gets it for herself. She decides that this is something she wants, and she acts on it.

And she doesn’t just lose her shoe; the prince knows she’s going to run, so he tries to stop her by smearing the steps with pitch, not imagining that she’ll just step out of the stuck shoes and keep running. And Grimm also addresses the issue of other feet fitting the slipper – Stepmama is willing to cut off pieces of her daughters’ feet to make the shoe fit and make them a princess, and it’s the spirit of Cindy’s mother that lets the prince know he’s got the wrong girl.

But that’s not the version most people know. That’s not the one we cling to. We fixate on the story of the helpless maiden, who can’t even bring herself to ask for what she wants, and the prince who apparently cares so little about her that he sends a servant to find her rather than go himself. Yeah, that’s a love story for the ages . . .

Checklist.

Give Cinderella some control of her own destiny. This is a big one for me because I hate damsels in distress. And I hate the message that if you cry about something long enough, someone will come and fix it for you. So, I’d like to see Cinderella have some measure of control, some way in which she is active in her own ending.

Enhance the role of the prince. In this original story, he doesn’t honestly do much either. He dances, he falls in love, he finds a shoe, he sends a servant out to get the girl. I’d like to see more from this character. I’d like to know why his father is so desperate to marry him off, I’d like to see him display some manner of intelligence, and I’d like some evidence that he’s actually in love with Cinderella.

Address the plot transgressions. Seriously, this story is full of holes, and there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. In fact, there are enough of them that I’m going to list them:

• Why does Cindy’s dad allow her to be treated so horribly?           
• Why doesn’t Cindy fight her servitude or leave if she’s being treated so badly?  
• Why hasn’t the fairy godmother made an appearance before this point, if she’s charged with Cinderella’s happiness and well being?
• Anybody going to question glass slippers? Don’t know if you know this, but shoes are designed to move with your feet as you walk and run and dance, etc. Also don’t know if you know this, but glass? Doesn’t do those things. It’s actually pretty rigid and unyielding. So, can we talk about the glass slippers?
•  Why don’t the slippers disappear along with the rest of the FG’s gifts?
• Why does the prince need the shoe to identify Cinderella, and is it really reasonable to assume that it will?
                           

Plot holes, guys. Fix ‘em.

Anyway, here’s the lineup, and it was difficult narrowing this list down to five. As you can see, I still haven’t quite managed it.

Week 1: Just Ella by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Week 2: Princess of Glass by Jessica Day George
Week 3: Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Week 4: TBA (Down to two, depends on if my first choice will actually work for review)
Week 5: Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

I appreciate your patience with the wait this month, and I hope to have the first review up by tomorrow.