Kay's Bookshelf

What I liked most about the characters in the book was their multidimensionality: they felt real, they had (at times contradictory) feelings and they didn’t fit any typology of good and bad. My favorite character was (of course) Iris: she’s a good girl albeit, loving her two sisters and helping them as best as she can, although she cannot help feeling jealousy when the boys she likes seem smitten with Clara’s beauty. Iris has an inferiority complex when it comes to looks, because she is quite plain looking, her mother not hesitating to call her ugly now and then — and yet, perhaps paradoxically, perhaps because of an unconscious inner yearn for what she doesn’t possess, Iris is the one who has “an eye” for beauty, seeing it wherever she looks, in the way the colors are arranged or in the way light falls on surfaces. Clara on the other hand is almost the very opposite: while not a bad child she is strange (“willful and timid at once“), sucking her thumb long after infancy and afraid of the world outside her home (perhaps with a good reason to, as she was kidnapped when she was three). Unfortunately she lacks the solicitude Iris has, placing her own interests above all else.

Even Maragarethe, “the wicked stepmother”, is not as wicked as one would have expected. While not necessarily a good person, she loves her daughters and would make anything to help them have good lives. From that point of view I couldn’t help relating her to Scarlett O’Hara: the way both Scarlett and Margarethe have had to starve and see their loved ones starve with them; the way both of them have then tried to go any lengths in order for that not to happen again, including marrying men they did not love; and also in the way both Scarlett and Margarethe shared a complete lack of taste when they at last married into money. These similitudes made me perhaps like Margarethe a bit more than I would have liked her otherwise, because they helped me detach her image from the expected “wicked stepmother” one and understand her situation better.

I was very pleasantly surprised on reading this book. When I read Wicked I almost hated it for all the cruelty it contained (towards the Animals, towards Elphaba herself) and, although I liked the writing, I didn’t expect to pick up another book of this author anytime soon. And yet the premise of this book sounded interesting and, hoping no cruelty will be involved, I picked it up. And I am very glad I did, because, while it also provokes strong feelings (luckily nothing as painfully unjust as some situations in Wicked were), it adds a lot of depth to a story we all have heard times and times before.

It is perhaps amusing how the author, while keeping the main elements, the ones that make the story easily identifiable (a mother with two daughters marries a man with one daughter of his own; the man’s daughter is nicknamed Cinderella; there is a ball and a prince and a beautiful unknown girl who steals the prince’s heart; a slipper that would later on help the prince identify the girl), changed almost anything else. The three girls love each other like sisters; no one forced Cinderella to live in the kitchen, it was her very own choice; for that matter, Clara/Cinderella does not have a heart of gold nor are her stepsisters evil; the pumpkin carriage is merely an invention; and so on.

My favorite lines were the very last lines in the book (which I can safely put here as they don’t actually have any connection whatsoever to the rest):

But to be most effective, the faces of the children would need to be painted in a blur, the way all children’s faces truly are. For they blur as they run; they blur as they grow and change so fast; and they blur to keep us from loving them too deeply, for their protection, and also for ours.

What I liked most: The very idea of taking a well known story such as Cinderella and twist it in order to enable us to see the points of view of the other people involved in the story. Oh, and also the fact that the story was placed in a real world setting (Holland no less :) ).

What I liked least: show spoiler

Recommend it to? Everyone, hee hee. I really liked it you know :)

Written by the same author:
Matchless
Wicked

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