So This is Love

by Elizabeth Lim

April 7, 2020 · Disney Hyperion

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After Poppy’s beautiful “That Moment When…” post, A Handy Guide for Choosing Your Institute of Magical Education, LiteraryCharlie’s Angels, Eleanor Oliphant Wasn’t Completely Fine, and Neither Are Many of Us, and Awesome Non-Human Sidekicks in Books art essays, we are so excited to have some guest reviews from her!

Poppy is a long-time fan of SBTB and loves cats, books and coffee, in that order. She illustrates The Loo Cats, an imaginative series starring her rescue cats in the most fantastical, improbable scenarios. The series is an ode to four spunky felines who survived abuse and abandonment before they found their forever home. Now they are elderly and ill, and can only travel in their human’s wild, colour-saturated imagination – but they continue to bring delight and iridescence to the lives of those around them. Join them on their adventures @geninepoppyloo on Instagram!

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NB: this review pairs very well with the first of Poppy’s two guest reviews: As Old As Time by Liz Braswell.

The twist of this story: Cinderella never got to try on the glass slipper during the door-to-door search and couldn’t prove that she was the Prince’s lost love. She ended up working in the palace as a seamstress and got caught up in political intrigue and other shenanigans.

The plot… made of glass?

Hoookay, the plot. There was a lot of plot. There was the star-crossed lovers thread (will they ever meet after the ball?), the political intrigue thread, the Stop Discriminating Against Magic and Fairies thread, and a bunch of others: how to democratise the monarchy (King and Prince wanted to invite “commoners” into the Royal Council, plus the Prince wanted to marry a non-royal), tension between upstairs and downstairs (how do overworked servants react when the King orders a ball where all eligible maidens and their mamas are invited…?), and Cinderella’s friendships with various people at the palace.

I think, if we had half as many things happening, the story could have progressed better without bouncing all over the place and leaving the plot as flimsy as a glass slipper. If I had a fairy godmother, I’d get her to wave her wand to further develop the upstairs vs downstairs thread. I really enjoyed all the short-lived glimpses into how servants kept the huge complex machinery of a palace turning, and I squealed with excitement when the housekeeper and servants started to discuss all the stuff they’d need to do for the ball.

Alas, my longed-for logistics/ housekeeping/ interior deco talk lasted as long as Cindy’s dress after the stroke of midnight. Another beef: the backstory for why magic and fairies got banned was handled so hastily and unsatisfactorily that those few paragraphs could have just been replaced with “because the plot needed it.”

Cinderella, Ella, Ella, Eh Eh EH

Through the thick bramble of plot, we see Cinderella trying really hard to have Character Growth. In the first few times she landed in trouble, someone else conveniently came along to rescue her. That changed towards the end of the book: she rescued herself plus she gave her stepmom and stepsisters quite the kickass mic-drop talking to. At one pivotal part, she had even a, “Hey, I just realised I’ve actually never been happy” moment and then actually made a plan to do something about it. She did have some moments of Mary Sue-ism (quite similar to the animation), but this update injected her with some pep and sparkle. Overall, I liked Cinderella.

So was this Love?

In contrast, the Prince came across as a naive bore and ricocheted between bleeding-heart “I wanna helps The Poor Peeples” and entitled brat “Servants! Go search the kingdom for this chick I made out with who ran away from me. What? You still haven’t found her?!” Every time he came on the scene it was like putting on a sweaty T-shirt after taking a shower.

It also didn’t help that the story retained the Disney love-at-first-sight nonsense, which had them spending what seemed like 10-15mins talking and canoodling, then 12 o’clock struck and CeCe ran off, prompting the besotted Prince to start a kingdom-wide search because Twoo Wuv. It’s a lousy idea to propagate to kids or anyone for that matter.

I’m not sure how much leeway authors for this series have in handling the stories, because #DisneyCorporation, but I really appreciated the effort made to update this tale with humour and as much common sense as could be stuffed into the story. The Grand Duke dispatched to tour the kingdom with a single glass shoe in hopes of locating Cinderella was PISSED OFF. He spent many pages almost breaking the 4th wall by snarking about the heaps of feet and squealing hopefuls he had to handle, how he ought to be at council meetings instead and omg why was there birdshit on his dad’s statue.

“What had he done to deserve such a fate? To be volleyed around the kingdom like some common messenger boy? He’d spent all night and all morning reciting a silly proclamation about a glass slipper instead of working on critical laws and budget plans to share with the council.”

TRUTH, even though…

I wanted more view-from-the-staff scenes! Gimme the logistics behind a fairy tale!

Another bright spot in this story: the Prince’s aunt. She was quite the Duchess of Reason, telling Cinderella, “hard work and fortitude is what will get you ahead. Not swooning over my nephew.” At the same time she served her nephew much needed truth bombs, “Fitting a glass slipper is not a sign of character or of compatibility … A girl might cut off her toes simply to fit the glass slipper.” She and the king also repeatedly asked him (echoing all our thoughts), “Dude, she RAN AWAY from you, you sure about this?”

In summary

I liked that Cinderella had some character development, I enjoyed the moments of breaking-4th-wall humour, I yearned for more servants talking. But I wanted more fleshed out plot developments and a Prince that was less like a soggy meringue.

Once upon a time…

Like Beauty and the Beast, the origins of the Cinderella story are fascinating and complex. Check out the roundup of Cinderella stories on the Wikipedia link below! There are hundreds of versions of this story from all over the world.

Cinderella Tales From Around the World by Heidi Anne Heiner covers 150 full-length stories from Asia to Europe, and summaries of 200 others. Most of them have the Evil Stepmother trope – not original to Cinderella, but popular for a time of high childbirth mortality rates, so remarriage and stepmoms were common.

Other recurring themes include rising above humble origins to marry a rich powerful guy, long-suffering and abused young women, and heaps of divine or supernatural intervention. Many stories were quite dark: the Duchess’ comment about girls cutting off their toes comes from the (aptly named) Brothers Grimm version, Aschenputtel, in which Cindy’s stepsisters sliced off parts of their feet to fit into the slipper. Others had the stepmom violently killed in various inventive ways (including cannibalism…), and in the 17th century Italian version Cenerentola, “Cinderella” didn’t want to get married but was captured and forced into it.

[Sources: NPR, Vox, Refinery29, Wikipedia]

I’m gonna end the review with some general thoughts about what I think makes a good retelling/ reimagined story:

1. A truly refreshing twist – if the twist isn’t impactful or doesn’t actually raise eyebrows, what’s the point? So far, the books I’ve read in this series have delivered on this count.

2. Deepens my understanding of the original story – I grew up on the Disney animations, and even at my tender young age had been plagued with questions (like why was the Enchantress in Beauty and the Beast so pissed with an 11 year old brat? And why couldn’t the Fairy Godmother appear earlier to magick Cindy out of her shitty situation?) I was pleased that these retellings have attempted to give us some sort of explanation. The success of the attempts varied, but I appreciated the attempt nonetheless.

3. Give me more insight into the characters – especially the female protagonists, who often suffered from extremely irritating Mary Sue-ish tendencies in the animations. I liked that we got to see some glimpses of normalcy in the retellings, with actual human emotions like doubt, jealousy, even moments of brattiness.

I intend to plow on with the other books in this series. Has anyone read these? Let me know how you found them, or what you think makes for good retellings of classics!