Trigger warning: Discussion of rape without being shown.
So this was an interesting retelling. I thought that Hochhauser did a great job with character development of someone we have always just known as the wicked stepmother in Cinderella. But, at times, I thought she was way too naive for her age and what she had gone through (that was in the latter part of the book). And parts of the book I thought dragged way too much.
Lady Tremaine follows Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley. Ethel is a mother of two children (Mathilde and Rosie) and stepmother to one stepchild (Elin) and is doing what she can to keep a roof over their heads after the death of her second husband. When the King and Queen throw a ball that invites specific young ladies to it and that excludes Ethel’s two children Mathilde and Rosie, she stops at nothing to make sure they meet the Prince and have the chance to change their lives.
Ethel we quickly find out was not one of the glamorous young ladies of the land, but she fell hard for the wealthy merchant son, Henry Tremaine. She had a rival for his affections though and in the end she won, but it seems not in the long-term. Instead she’s left widowed. Being a widowed woman with two young daughters, Ethel had to fend for herself or lose both of her daughters. The book slides back and forth between Ethel’s past (how she became Lady Tremaine and then Bramley) and the present with her dealing with a Prince who seems hyper focused on her stepdaughter Elin.
I liked the character of Ethel. We do get her insights into being a mother, what it means to her now and what she will do to protect and care for her daughters. She’s focused on them being a real part of a polite society. And instead she’s dealing with a stepdaughter who doesn’t want to do any work, but quote passages of a book at her. And man, I was ready to shake Elin at a certain point in this story. I do wish though that if this story is about the love of a mother for her daughters, we had more interaction between Ethel and her daughters. We had whole passages about them and them as young girls, but she either cajoled, pushed, etc. them throughout the story and only really came clean with her oldest daughter Mathilde about what was going on. And then of course, she has to later on with Elin. I also didn’t really think that the later naivety that Ethel shows about [redacted] even made sense. She’s had to deal with hard things, I just didn’t find it plausible that she would flounder the way she did and even why she was running around trying to hide what she had found out. I would have told everyone. Blackmailed, etc. That would have made better sense than what we got.
The other characters we get outside of Ethel, her first and second husband, her daughters, Elin, and others, did feel very developed. You can picture the characters, the scenes, the dialogue quite vividly.
That said, the flow was up and down. As I said, there are whole passages of Ethel telling you about her daughters, a mother’s love, etc. and it goes on and on a lot. And there’s some scheming (not a lot) but I think that the book saying it’s a retelling of Cinderella felt a bit false at times. There are some elements there, but this feels like a very different story/plot than the Grimm’s Fairy Tale one. And of course I know even that one is quite different than the French story, and others that inspired this very old folk tale. Probably the only thing that stayed the same was inviting all of the young ladies in the kingdom to the ball and I loved how Houchhauser turned that on its head.
The setting of this kingdom, the house, the land that Ethel owned was very well described I thought.
The ending though. I don’t know. It was great for what we got, but I think I just needed a bit more there. I don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s a whole plot/reveal that I thought was quite good, but again, had the way of making me feel like I was reading a different story and not a retelling of Cinderella.
