Loved it -- it's a reverse gender Cinderella sci-fi adventure. Keeps the reader engaged untl the last page.

Didn't click for me the way it likely would for other people. It was interesting and fun enough, but the characters just didn't work for me. I never really connected with any of them or with their romance. It took me a while to get into the story, it seemed as though Aidan was meant to be a rougish Han Solo type, but he came off smug and arrogant at first (there's also tinges of Disney's Aladdin, and it makes me wonder why the story didn't go more in that direction, rather than gender-swapped Cinderella. The characters fit better that way, but I guess you lose the shoe wordplay which felt very "ooh this is so clever look at what I did" rather than seamless.)

The original folklore/belief of the world was pretty interesting and I would have liked a bit more of that rather than focusing on the romance. Increasing that background might give more of a foundation for character motivation that I felt they lacked.
Take this spoiler tag seriously, don't read it if you haven't read the book and plan to.<spoiler> It's always a bit risky to have a big twist or spoiler and then shift a lot of the tone or focus of the work based on that. Telling anyone that Aidan is not human would take a lot away from the story, I think it's important to go into this spoiler free, but then the reader doesn't know the theme of 'can an automaton/robot love?' 'what truly makes us human' when that might inform a choice to read it. I, personally, am not really excited about exploring that idea in fiction. Maybe because I read [book:The Silver Metal Lover|567708] pretty young and I'm like "okay, that was very good, that's all I need" or maybe because equating humanity to romantic love has some real unfortunate implications for asexual people and I'm not here for this (Has there been much about a robot learning to love in any way other than romantic? I can only think of the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence. I would love to read something with that theme, remembering that love is more than sexual/romantic love would take away the possible aro/ace phobia. </spoiler>

The end gets a lot of adventure and action, but by that point I was reading a little quickly from a lack of interest, so it became something of a blur. I didn't quite feel the sisterly relationship between Delia and her sister, she easily could have been a cousin or handmaiden, except that it allows the slight cop out for the ending <spoiler> it did feel like a cop out to me, to say that the line of succession was fine through her sister so no big deal marrying a robot. If she was a cousin, the same decision could have been made with a little more weight, and a woman in power choosing a life that meant no natural born children is a really great plot point if allowed to stay that powerful. </spoiler> The world building was a little interesting, but without strong characters I really connected to, I'm happy to shut the book without exploring further.

Aiden has been stealing trinkets for years so he can save enough to leave his step-family and Astor. When a burlery goes wrong, he meets Princess Delia who is currently trying to escape having to choose among several princes for the salvation of her kingdom. The two form an unlikely friendship and bend together to solve Astor's problem.

I'm a sucker for a good fairy tale retelling, and this retelling of Cinderella was extra fun. I appreciated the role reversal and the final joke about shoes...

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My opinion was not affected by the free copy.

This is going to be a really hard one to talk about without going into spoilers. When I saw this was a gender reverse of Cinderella, I was intrigued. You don't get to see many takes on it where the guy is in the role of Cinderella. This is more like taking some familiar elements about the story-- the stepfamily, the ball, the shoe that fits just right-- and build a different story around it. I really think that the Lunar Chronicles have spoiled me on fairy tale retellings. Don't get me wrong, this book still did some things to make this a unique take, I guess I was just hoping for something else.

My biggest problem in this book is similar to the problem in Mulan 2. Basically, these princesses are in an arranged marriage in order to assure peace in China. If they don't go through with it, there will be war, people will die, etc. That's pretty much what's at stake here in this book. If going through an arranged marriage was all that was at stake, then yeah, I could root for Delia fighting that and wanting to marry for love. But it's the fate of her entire planet! Millions of people's lives depend on her arranging a marriage. Sorry, but it's hard to root for love over an arranged marriage in this case. Plus I'm a little tired of arranged marriages being shown as bad things. There are still people who do it, and they turn out happy together.

Also, Delia was an extremely frustrating main character. Besides what I just mentioned before, she seems really dumb at times. Aidan is constantly evasive and refuses to answer even the most simple of questions, and she never seems suspicious of him or tries to pursue the line of questioning or dives deeper into investigating where he came from. Actually, her mother's pretty frustrating, too. She seems to already know there's a resistance going on and doesn't seem to do anything about it. She is so insistence on this marriage being the only thing that'll help fix their planet when there are clearly lots of problems going on that she needs to solve that don't have anything to do with a marriage. Also, the security on the palace sucks. I don't want to go into it because of spoilers, but good lord. I don't know how this monarch survived with the terrible job they do at background checks and body scans or whatever they do in this world.

Now on to the romance. I want to give it some leeway since it is based on a fairy tale where insta-love is just what happens, but even so, I would've liked a modern update in that regard. And again, it's hard to root for their love when the fate of an entire planet may depend on Delia's marriage. Plus I feel like all of the other princes were portrayed as so "wrong" for her when it would've been more interesting to have a few who could've been good matches. For example, there's this one prince who's constantly mocked because he is a fan of this TV show and has a model ship collection, and has a lot of wigs I guess. The plot basically eliminated any competition Aidan would have had, and I don't want to explain for spoiler reasons.

I need to talk about the ending a little bit. There were about two or three deus ex machina moments in the last fourth of the book that had me rolling my eyes and thinking "of course". Yes, I know that this is based on a fairy tale, and those last parts felt very fairy tale-ish in nature, but with all this other serious stuff going on, I guess I was hoping for a different sort of conclusion. Don't introduce all these problems if you're going to sweep them all up at the end like they weren't as big of a deal as they were built up to be.

I will say that the mythology of this world was very cool. I almost wish I'd been reading that book instead. I also really liked Shania's character. She was so fun and energetic and funny.

It's written well and when the climax was going on, I was definitely flipping pages to see what would happen next. To me, it just seems like this would've been pretty much the same book without any of the Cinderella elements.

I was really looking forward to reading this book! It did not disappoint and i thought the whole plot was very interesting. I will be purchasing this book more my library.