I grabbed this book from the shelf on a whim on a day when I was headed to the beach: I wanted something that wasn’t heavy (literally or metaphorically!) and that wasn’t a book I cared about keeping spotless. Something that would be an interesting story, something that would be unlikely to make me want to write anything down or look anything up, and something I wouldn’t mind getting sandy or sunscreeny or wet with salt water, rain, or condensation from the liter of seltzer in my bag. So, this book it was, and I swam and sunned and swam some more and then happily read about 50 pages of it before pausing, looking up at the sky, and noticing that it was a whole lot darker than it had been when I started reading. So much for spending the whole afternoon at the beach. Luckily, I had a short walk to the train, and didn’t get caught in any downpours. Back at home, I happily started reading again, after a break for coffee and conversation and word games on Facebook and a glass of red wine, because this book is sweet and charming and made me want to keep reading, but didn’t seem, at first, to be one of those drop-everything books where the rest of the things I want to do cease entirely to exist.
So, the story. Ella is the daughter of nobility, and lives in a world with gnomes, elves, centaurs, ogres, and fairy godmothers. Right after she’s born, a fairy (not her fairy godmother, who’s much too smart for such idiocy) curses her while trying to give her a gift. “Ella will always be obedient,” the fairy says, and Ella is—she has to be, even when doing as she’s told is against her own self-interest. She tries to resist orders sometimes, but she can’t, she physically isn’t able: so she gets good at finding loopholes, figuring out ways to follow a command but not really doing what the other person wants. This serves her well enough at home, and all is pretty much right in Ella’s world until her mother dies and her father sends her off to finishing school with two awful twits whose mother clearly has designs on Ella’s father. This being a retelling of the Cinderella story (early in the story, Ella meets the kind Prince Charmont, aka Char), you can see where this is going.
I like the funny and sweet details of this book, like Ella talking about sliding down the banisters of the manor with her mother (when no one else was around, of course), or Ella describing the soup that the house’s cook has just made, how the cook “had gotten the carrots at their sweetest, carrotiest best,” and how “weaving in and out of the carrots were other flavors: lemon, turtle broth, and a spice I couldn’t name” (p 23). Or this, when Ella’s father has decided on finishing school because maybe they’ll teach her how to walk more quietly, like the small girl she is rather than like the small elephant she sounds like: “I left. On my way out, I said, “Perhaps small elephants cannot be admitted to finishing school. Perhaps small elephants cannot be finished. Perhaps they . . .” I stopped. He was laughing again.” (p 32). Or this, just after Ella leaves home on the way to school:
“I would never embrace a cook.” Hattie shuddered.
“No,” I agreed. “What cook would let you?” (p 50)
And I like that Ella and Char have personalities, are both funny and clever and playful, are people rather than just fairy-tale characters. Perhaps not surprisingly, by the end this book had turned into a drop-everything-and-read book, and I like it enough that I’m actually keeping my copy of it, at least for now: I’d picked it up thinking I’d read it and then put it in my building’s lobby for someone else to find, but now I don’t want to!
Leave a Reply