Book Review

Slippers and Thieves by Christina Bauer

Slippers and Thieves is a clever YA urban fantasy retelling of Cinderella. On the whole, I think this is a conceptually clever story, but the characterization isn’t great, and for goodness sake don’t treat it as a stand alone book.

Slippers and Thieves is the fourth book in the Fairy Tales of the Magicorum Series. In this series, magic users exist secretly alongside non-magical users in the modern world. Shifters, fairies, and witches are members of the Magicorum, and all are born with a “fairy tale life template”. Elle, our heroine, is one of these people, doomed to live out the story of Cinderella. This means that she can’t stop her mother from dying or her father from marrying an evil stepmother and then dying as well. However, she can do things like save money in secret so that when her father dies, she can run away from home. Elle is fae but for most of the book assumes her magical powers are minor.

Alec Le Charme is heir to the Le Charme jewelry empire. He and Elle end up attending the same school (a prep school for Magicorum members). He’s been crazy about Elle ever since they met, fleetingly, three years ago. But alas, his parents and other interests oppose the marriage to such an extent that a romance between them could mean war between all the various opposing partiesfor a variety of magical, economical, and personal reasons.

One of my big problems with this book was that I couldn’t figure out when Elle and Alec fell in love or why they were in love. However, there’s a reference to them having had adventures together earlier in the series, so if you’re interested in this story, it might begin in one of the prior books. Having said that, I think that Elle and Alec still needed a lot more relationship development and chemistry in their own book (this one).

Even allowing for the fact that I came in mid-way through the series , Elle and Alec never struck me as believable characters. The story is told in first person narration with Elle and Alec alternating chapters. The first few chapters take place when Alec and Elle are supposed to be 15, but they sound and behave like they are both much older. Then there is a time skip to a few weeks before they turn eighteen, but neither of them seem to have changed significantly.

Not only are their older voices indistinguishable from their younger voices, but their voices are indistinguishable from each other. They don’t behave or speak like real high school seniors, the logistics of their lives make no sense even allowing for fantastical handwaving, and the fact that I often lost track of whose chapter I was reading suggests that they did not have distinguishable personalities.

Elle and Alec also lack chemistry. There’s much more chemistry between Elle and Jacoby, a supporting character who seems determined to get a love triangle going, than there is between Elle and Alec, and that’s not saying much.

I did like the fairy tale twists, though. For instance, since people know what template they are living, they can make certain choices about how to act within that template, and those choices were always interesting, as were the outcomes. I especially enjoyed the fact that Elle’s fairy godmother is useless and that Elle:

plot spoiler about the Ball

uses her own magic to make her own dress and carriage, with no magical curfew holding her up.

There are certainly fun aspects to this book and some truly funny and exciting moments. However, I feel I can say fairly that the lack of compelling, believable characters with driving reasons to be together reduces this book to the realms of “meh.”

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Slippers and Thieves by Christina Bauer

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  1. Jazzlet says:

    What a shame, I do like a good fairy tale retelling and had been eyeing this series, so thank you for the review.

    The cover is very striking, a pity the book doesn’t deserve it.

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