Cinderella finds her happily-ever-afterlife in this sharp addition to the fairy-tale canon.
In this ghostly fairy-tale retelling, a spectral Cinderella struggles to stay corporeal enough to make it to the ball.
Sixteen-year-old Ella is a ghost haunting her magical house as a grudge against her murderous stepmother and abusive stepsisters. Being more house than girl compels Ella to slavishly follow her family’s orders in a manner that calls back to Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted, with the added obstacle that she can’t pass beyond the house’s foundation. Despite her limited life experience, Ella is no naïf, inventively expanding her world through mail-order books and distant correspondence while surviving her stepsisters’ unique tortures. As the years pass and people move on, she even discovers a loophole for exploring the city and meeting new faces—like canny fairy Quaint, with whom she barters for an enchanted solution to attend the prince’s ball. The familiar story elements—dress, glass slippers, midnight curfew—are given new life and interpretations, but there is no simple spell to resurrect Ella. Instead, she must carve out new ways of existing in the world and making people see her on her terms. The flesh-and-blood characters are equally compelling: thoughtful revelations subvert the “doting father” and “wicked stepmother” archetypes, while the prince contends with a well-meaning fairy curse that reduces him to a dangerous object of desire. A setting in which both bisexuality and polyamory are woven into the social fabric means more alluring opportunities for Ella’s postmortem romance, which Marske accomplishes with her usual aplomb. Marske unflinchingly explores the ways limited mobility and accessibility can erode one’s sense of self, inspired by her own experiences of being housebound due to long Covid, and how to triumphantly cross those thresholds.
Cinderella finds her happily-ever-afterlife in this sharp addition to the fairy-tale canon.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250341716
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Tordotcom
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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