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115 reviews for:

Brzydsza siostra

Sariah Wilson

3.65 AVERAGE


This is a modern take on Cinderella, only it's a Very loose take. The main character is Ella, a senior in highschool, and her stepsister Ella. They both live with Mattie's rich dad, and although Ella is an orphan, she's the cheerleader/beauty/popular/do-gooder, etc. girl. No one is mean to her at all. Mattie is very jealous, and she's the girl with just one friend who hangs on the side of everything, in love with the popular guy at school. This is a super short book - it took me less than a day. I love fairy tale books, so of course I wanted to read it, but while many young adult novels are more adult, this one genuinely seems to be geared towards teens. I would say even young teens/tweens. It's not bad, there's just nothing too it for a more sophisticated reader. If you enjoy fairy tales, give it a read!

Cute, clean and fun. Can't wait to read it with my girls when they're older. :)

exactly the kind of book I would have adored in middle school. Definitely not Proust, but a light, quick read.

The Ugly Stepsister Strikes Back by Sari ah Wilson is one of the best chick-lit, romance novels that I have read in a while. I usually don’t read books that are just categorized as romance because they tend to be very similar to one another and I can always predict what is going to happen next and this usually takes away some of the magic from the book. Sariah Wilson’s book The Ugly Stepsister Strikes Back takes a fresh new look at the classic fairytale of Cinderella and is not what one would usually expect. Although it took me a little while to get into it, once I got into The Ugly Stepsister Strikes Back I was totally hooked.

Full Review Here: http://reviewsfromthehammock.blogspot.com/2013/10/review-ugly-stepsister-strikes-back.html

Since I enjoyed Once Upon a Time Travel, also by Sariah Wilson, I decided to give The Ugly Stepsister Strikes Back a go. It was a cute, fast read.

Mattie and Ella are complete opposites. Mattie is on the bottom of the social totem pole while her stepsister, Ella, is one of the most popular girls in school. Ella is in a perfect match “like Ken and Barbie” with Jake Kingston... Mattie’s crush.

Don’t go judging a book by its cover. Mattie learns that not everything is as it seems.

It’s fun to see Mattie’s life play out like a John Hughes film. Although, I had some moments where I wanted to pull a Cher in Moonstruck and yell, “Snap out of it!”

I think this is most suited to young adults, but despite being some decades past my teens, I really enjoyed it.

Oh my goodness why didn't I read this book sooner?!?! I've had it on my kindle for so long. It was so cute! And clean!! I really liked it.

A good YA book that's geared more for younger readers. Tilly's insecurities really struck with me though, very well described.
funny lighthearted medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

This book was definitely something, and it's not funny. It's probably one of the longest reviews I've ever made.

Matilda

For starters, Matilda has 3 personality traits (4 if you include being 1/4 Japanese): drawing manga, liking Jake, and being tall (at 5'11), which according to Matilda, makes her look "like a troll." And apparently, her troll-ness prohibits her from dancing with anyone shorter than her, which was a reason why she rejected a boy. Also she wears fake glasses when she doesn't even need a prescription which upsets me to no end. Later she even asks, "What about my glasses?" when getting the classic makeover scene, like you even NEED glasses! (And yes I'm bitter because I actually have to wear glasses to see, and thus hate people who just wear it for ✨aesthetics ✨. And she's a slob too, using the excuse that she's giving the housekeeper a job.  Which is a very privileged thing to think, might I add. She also calls her school a "fascist state" because they *gasp* make students wear uniforms and forbid home lunches! (The lunch thing is a bit too far, but uniforms are pretty common for rich schools.)

Matilda is down pretty bad for Jake. She gets so excited when she finds out that he knows her name. And just one compliment from Jake and she couldn't even remember her own name. She also thinks sweaty Jake is sexy, but no one's sexy when they're sweaty. Also, having a six-pack is actually quite unhealthy, unlike what media would like you to believe. There were a couple of weird, troubling thoughts she had when thinking of Jake. She thought, "We would have such beautiful babies with his eyes and my smile" after a single compliment. "There was a small sense of relief at his being gone since I'd been this close to throwing my arms around his neck and begging to be his love slave or something equally horrific." Umm, exCUSE me?! "I could think of a lot of things to say, but I was pretty sure that if I told Jake I wanted to bear his firstborn child, he would freak out a little." But to be honest, I was quite shocked when she stood up to Jake. She said that Jake wasn't worth her integrity, but (at the time) she was still pining over her stepsister's boyfriend.

She seems to place a lot of her self worth on Jake, which is pretty unhealthy. "He made me feel beautiful and smart and like I could conquer the entire world."

There's also a lot of girl-hating in this book. I want to see women solidarity, not tearing each other down! Matilda mostly does it when it comes to Jake. About Ella, she thinks, "Oh, to be blonde and beautiful and totally delusional." "[Jake] had no reason to want me, though. not when he could have any girl just by snapping his fingers. Well, not me, I decided. If he wanted me, he'd have to work for it. I wouldn't be like those other skanks." She thinks that since Mercedes (the typical mean girl) is pretty, she must be stupid. Also, she describes her as a "vacuous, spray-tanned, silicon-injected, nose-altered waste of space," which gives her mega "not like other girls" energy. When Ella was dating Jake, Matilda thought it was weird that Ella didn't spend every waking moment with him, like Ella couldn't have her own life outside her boyfriend? And there's chess club-hating in this book, too.

Her father also uses nepotism to get Matilda an internship at TOKYOPOP. At the silent auction, I saw where Matilda got her down bad-ness from--donating TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS just because you like someone? JEEZ! And apparently she was somehow supposed to know that her father wasn't actually bad at relationships, he just got into marriages of convenience so she could have a mother figure? How was she supposed to know if he never told her? Also when she told her dad, "Dad, I draw manga," it had the same gravity as if she were telling him, "Dad, I'm gay." I just found it kind of funny that the moment was so serious.

I kind of feel bad for her when it comes to her mother, since her mother only calls Matilda when her dad pays her to do it. But Matilda was so stupid to think that when her mother called her obtuse, she thought she was calling her fat. She's an idiot. She also thought that she was a "carnivore" since Trent and Ella were vegetarians, but she does know that not being a vegetarian doesn't make you a carnivore, right? It makes you an omnivore. Vegetarians are different from herbivores, so carnivores aren't an accurate antonym of vegetarians. She's like one of those TikTok carnivores who think eating, like, Mac and cheese can be part of the carnivore lifestyle.

The Male Lead

Matilda describes him as "lustalicious." He's also friends with jerks, but "routinely stopped his stupid friends from picking on other kids." Why is he even friends with them in the first place then, hmm?

In the bonus chapters from his POV, he was really possessive of Matilda. When he believed she was dating her friend Trent, he thought, "My way to smooth things over and help her realize that she should be with me, not that lanky wannabe Darth Vader." He also thought, "[Matilda] can't ignore me forever. She'd have to talk to me. She had no choice." "I'd make it up to Mattie. And then I'd figure out a way to make her my girl." Ew. "I liked her wearing my jacket. It was almost like...because she was wearing something of mine she belonged to me." He later goes on to say that he belongs to her as well, but the sentiment is still kind of creepy IMO. So was "I took an inordinate amount of pleasure in the fact that I made her so nervous." The creepiest of all was: "[Matilda] reminded me of the skittish feral cat my mom had adopted when I was eleven. So I did with Mattie what I'd done with Felix. I ignored her. Focused on the movie. Pretended she wasn't even there. If experience with Felix had taught me anything, it was that I'd have her curled up and purring in my lap before long."

He uses his good looks to try and manipulate Matilda into doing what he wants, but when he refused, he's shown as a big, privileged man-baby with one quote: "Other than my father, nobody in my life ever told me no. The earlier anger I'd felt from my phone conversation with my dad roared back to life inside me, and I wanted to yell and throw desks." He also basically calls her an attention whore by saying (in reference to her fuchsia hair), "You do your hair like that and dress the way you do because you are dying to stand out. You are dying for me to notice you." Based on that comment, he sounds like the guy to accuse a SA victim of "asking for it" by the way they dress. Also, not everything is ABOUT you, mister. Maybe she just likes the color. It doesn't mean she requires male validation. And if she DOES want your attention (which ends up being the case), who cares?

Also from the bonus POV chapters, he kept dissing Matilda's friend Trent in completely unwarranted, rude ways. Originally it's because he thinks Matilda and Trent are dated (because guys and girls can't POSSIBLY be "just friends" without there being something going on), but even after he figures out it was all a misunderstanding, he's still mean. One quote is in the section above, but here are some more. "Was it really that serious between her and the off-brand ninja?" "The poor man's Jon Snow was nowhere to be found." "The wannabe Edward Scissorhands returned...I thought he was an idiot."

But he does laugh at her lame/stupid jokes, so maybe they really are meant to be.

Some Problematic Things

I feel like having Matilda be 1/4 Japanese despite looking completely white is just an excuse to include some Japanese stereotypes. From Matilda: "I mean, I don't know what good it does me to be one-quarter Japanese. I didn't get any of the good traits. I suck at math. I'm uncoordinated, so there's no way I could ever be a ninja, and I think Harajuku fashion is weird. One the flip side, though, I am a very bad driver." Later she explains she said those thing to piss her mother off, but it still felt very weird to include. There was also a weird bit about Matilda's stance on chopsticks: "...she offered me a pair of chopsticks, which I refused. I never, ever used chopsticks, on principle. My fork worked perfectly fine, thanks." It may be because she hates her 1/4 Japanese self but it just felt like such an American thing to say.

"[Jake had] helped the girl from the special ed class pick up her books that she'd dropped...then walked with her to her next class. Everyone else had just walked by. Not Jake."

This is the only mention of a special ed character in the entire book, and the sole purpose of the character was to prop up Jake's moral character as the ML. This kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

Extra Bits

At times, Matilda felt like a mouthpiece for the author. She treated vegetarianism like it was evil, and the two vegetarians she knew like Jehovah's Witnesses when it comes to trying to get people to stop eating meat. Matilda also HATES Mark Twain and the author makes a teacher's personality about worshipping him but Matilda loves Jane Austen. 

There is a discreet Gordon Ramsey cameo. At least, I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be him. After all, it's an "after-hours cooking course with that famous chef on TV who swore at everyone," so...

And everything worked out perfectly, happily ever after. Jake and Ella broke up, and Jake got with his ex's stepsister and Ella got with the stepsister's BFF. 

I did make some hypotheses that ended up not happening. I thought Jake would pretend to be interested in Matilda to get her to drop out of the election, but would gain feelings for her in the process, but she finds out, leading to a third act conflict that gets resolved when he reveals his true feelings. I also thought that the reason he wanted to get out of detention was because his mom was hospitalized (probably because of cancer) and he wanted to visit her since his father was emotionally distant except to scold him. I did completely guess that Ella only said yes to Jake because he asked, not because there were any real feelings involved.