I'm not a girl who grew up reading fairy tales. The stories were read to me, but I didn't have any special attachment to them, or the Disney movies that then followed.
Lady Tremaine is a re-telling -or an untelling, as Hochhauser called it in a recent podcast I listened to - told in the perspective of Cinderella's stepmother.
The wicked stepmother and horrible stepsisters from the Cinderella of my childhood look vastly different than they do in Tremaine. We get an entirely different perspective when we hear Lady Etheldreda's side of things. Her first love ended in tragedy, leaving her with two young daughters, and the need to create a life on her own. Etheldreda is a survivor, and despite the variety of challenges that life continues to present to her, she perseveres. When she finds a man who can bring some sense of stability for her and her children, she takes the chance, also taking on raising Elin, who has been raised without a mother for much of her childhood.
Elin isn't the easiest child, yet when the prince picks her over one of her new stepsisters, Etheldreda doesn't understand what the attraction could be until she does a little research on her own and realizes that things aren't quite what they appear.
I loved this book so much, and will think of Cinderella in an entirely different way from now on.
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