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A review by smart_girls_love_trashy_books
All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella's Stepmother by Danielle Teller
4.0
-POTENTIAL SPOILERS-
I'm back at it again with the Cinderella retellings/reimaginings. Unlike the last few I read, however, mainly last year, I was actually very pleasantly surprised by this one. Most of the time, the retellings bored me or felt like they were missing something, so I ended up feeling uninterested or bored by a lot of them. I didn't initially have high hopes for this one, despite the plot interesting me. I was happy that it ended up surprising me, I ended up really liking this one.
Firstly, I like how it's a strict historical fiction, set in a specific time and place, this being 1300's England, around the time of the Hundred Years War. I'm a sucker for fairytale retellings that are actually more based in history instead of focusing on the fantastical elements, but it's hard to find any that aren't Christian, and those often tend to be dull. I liked the change of setting to England because it was unique, as well as the more Medieval time period. I've read that fairytale scholars notice that Cinderella is often seen as a more 'modern' story with the talk of carriages and balls, so you often see retellings of it set in the 1600's and later, in contrast to Snow White, which is seen as a more primitive story with the focus on witchcraft and cottages in the woods. My point is that it's interesting to see a retelling like this shake things up and put Cinderella in a more faraway time period and yet still have everything work out.
I liked the stepmother's character. Here, she wasn't evil, just someone who was dealt a bunch of bad hands in life and had to make do with everything she had. I also liked how her children, AKA the stepsisters, aren't actually ugly in a traditional sense. One is just mixed, and the other is marked by an illness. In the original versions, such as Grimm and Perrault, the stepsisters were described as just as beautiful as Cinderella, only with ugly hearts, so I thought that was an interesting change, since it shows that the sisters here aren't really ugly to themselves but moreso to society and it's a more realistic take on that.
I also think it was interesting how Cinderella's mother was clearly mentally ill, and seemed to pass it onto her daughter, who seems to be autistic/neurotic? The story obviously wasn't clear because they wouldn't have known back then, but she gives me those signs. I did dislike how the story sorta painted her into being a brat that couldn't be understood or reasoned with, it reminded me of Gregory Macguire's story and how it did something similar because I feel writers only do that to show why the villain was so good and correct while making the heroine of the original tale a bad person. While Cinderella does end up becoming a good person by the end, or should I say, she was good but also bad, she's complex, those parts were annoying for me to read.
Overall, a really good and unique take on the idea of not just retelling Cinderella but reframing it from the stepmother's perspective. However, much like the other ones I've read lately, it was just missing a certain something that would've made me like it even more.
I'm back at it again with the Cinderella retellings/reimaginings. Unlike the last few I read, however, mainly last year, I was actually very pleasantly surprised by this one. Most of the time, the retellings bored me or felt like they were missing something, so I ended up feeling uninterested or bored by a lot of them. I didn't initially have high hopes for this one, despite the plot interesting me. I was happy that it ended up surprising me, I ended up really liking this one.
Firstly, I like how it's a strict historical fiction, set in a specific time and place, this being 1300's England, around the time of the Hundred Years War. I'm a sucker for fairytale retellings that are actually more based in history instead of focusing on the fantastical elements, but it's hard to find any that aren't Christian, and those often tend to be dull. I liked the change of setting to England because it was unique, as well as the more Medieval time period. I've read that fairytale scholars notice that Cinderella is often seen as a more 'modern' story with the talk of carriages and balls, so you often see retellings of it set in the 1600's and later, in contrast to Snow White, which is seen as a more primitive story with the focus on witchcraft and cottages in the woods. My point is that it's interesting to see a retelling like this shake things up and put Cinderella in a more faraway time period and yet still have everything work out.
I liked the stepmother's character. Here, she wasn't evil, just someone who was dealt a bunch of bad hands in life and had to make do with everything she had. I also liked how her children, AKA the stepsisters, aren't actually ugly in a traditional sense. One is just mixed, and the other is marked by an illness. In the original versions, such as Grimm and Perrault, the stepsisters were described as just as beautiful as Cinderella, only with ugly hearts, so I thought that was an interesting change, since it shows that the sisters here aren't really ugly to themselves but moreso to society and it's a more realistic take on that.
I also think it was interesting how Cinderella's mother was clearly mentally ill, and seemed to pass it onto her daughter, who seems to be autistic/neurotic? The story obviously wasn't clear because they wouldn't have known back then, but she gives me those signs. I did dislike how the story sorta painted her into being a brat that couldn't be understood or reasoned with, it reminded me of Gregory Macguire's story and how it did something similar because I feel writers only do that to show why the villain was so good and correct while making the heroine of the original tale a bad person. While Cinderella does end up becoming a good person by the end, or should I say, she was good but also bad, she's complex, those parts were annoying for me to read.
Overall, a really good and unique take on the idea of not just retelling Cinderella but reframing it from the stepmother's perspective. However, much like the other ones I've read lately, it was just missing a certain something that would've made me like it even more.