"And you're not lost?"

I think for a moment. "Maybe I am. But the difference is that I want to be found. I'm not happy pretending everything is fine when I know it's not."

//

Cinderella is Dead is a fast-paced, powerful tale about fighting against injustice no matter the cost. Featuring a Black lesbian protagonist who can't help but rebel against the patriarchal, homophobic world inspired by Cinderella's fairy tales, this is a great YA fairy tale retelling that asks the reader to think deeply about complicity, oppression, and the cost of resistance.


(this book has content warnings for: domestic violence)

This book had a wholly original take on the Cinderella fairy tale but despite it's cleverness, it fell extremely flat. Most plot points and their relation to the original fairy tale were great which made it even harder to read the dull and lifeless writing that connected them. My favorite thing about this novel and the only reason it was rounded up to a solid 3 stars was the concept. I cannot fault Bayron's imagination. She took the age old Cinderella fairy tale, one that has been adapted millions of times, and turned it into a completely new adventure. Our setting is Lille where 200 years ago, Cinderella attended the Prince's ball and had her dreams come true.... or did they? Sophia is one of hundreds of girls in the kingdom who are forced to attend an annual ball where girls are "chosen" by the men of the nation. They are required to know the Cinderella tale by heart and their family's must spend their savings on dresses and accoutrements. If the girls fail to be chosen, they could be forfeited which means never being seen again. Sophia hates her kingdom and it's customs, yearning instead to run away with her best friend and love Erin, but is thwarted by the strict rules set in place. After a narrow escape, Sophia teams up with Constance, who's connection to the Cinderella tale sings a different tune than age old scripture. The duo must figure out the mystery behind the King and take him down to save the kingdom.

Despite being 100% up my alley (even summarizing the plot made me yearn for what could have been), this book failed to make me care about any of the characters. I wanted to revert to back to my fangirl ways and get hit in the feels and ship people to death but never felt any real connections to the characters, despite their potential. Bayron's writing was overly descriptive and juvenile which read like it was geared towards middle grade or children's despite it's obvious teen/YA draw. I felt myself comparing the novel to Chris Colfer's Land of Stories books. While Colfer's writing is also a bit juvenile, they lean into the hokey-ness of the fairy tale world and it becomes light, middle grade fare. Bayron is telling a story that is meant for older readers so the writing feels overly simplistic and corny in comparison.

All in all, this book has me curious to read more of Bayron's work. I love to see writer's evolve with each new work and with the sheer brilliance of this concept, I hope for great things in the future! This is still worth the read if any of the plot intrigues you. Bayron's new take is a fun, eye-opening way to revisit Cinderella, especially amid the Trump presidency and the current political climate.

What an absolutely ESSENTIAL read for anyone who loves fairy tales. Holy shit, this was excellent and exactly what I needed right now. Dynamic and authentic, if not a bit elementary in the prose. Thank you for the ARC!

Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron

Title had me hooked right away. When I realized how this very opposite to the Disney story I grew up with, I kept reading. I am so glad I did. Taking place 200 years after Cinderella died offers an up-dated version to the classic tale and so much more. Girl power all the way!
This needs to be made into a movie! It is such a vivid delight!

If you hear a story enough, will it become your truth? I grew up watching princess movies, thinking to find true love, I just needed to sing and have some animal friends. My prince would show up because it was true love. This book breaks the mold that so many of us believed we had to fit. And I just had to know what was going to happen!

Definitely worth the hype! The story was excellent, well paced, and I loved all of the characters!! A really quick and fantastic read. I loved it!

ARC provided by the publisher through NetGalley.
Cinderella is Dead has an excellent pitch, and I went in ready to LOVE it. Queer Black girls destroy the patriarchy. That one line absolutely sold me, and if it sold you too, then I would not discourage you from grabbing a copy and seeing if you love it the way I wanted to. Alas, I did not enjoy the book very much.
Cinderella is Dead is set in the world of Cinderella, but she has been dead for 200 years. Her story is mandated to be read by every woman in the Kingdom, and they all must attend a ball at the age of 16 to find a husband. Our main character is Sophia, a 16-year-old Black girl who would much rather find a princess than a prince and live happily ever after with her. Again, I love everything about the pitch.

Worldbuilding
This part of the book really fell flat for me, I wanted to find the world interesting, but we get so little nuance of the world it is really hard to be emersed in. I found it very one-note and kept being pulled out of the story because I was questioning, "how can this actually work?" over and over.
I found it utterly bizarre that basically all women mindlessly follow the story of Cinderella with no deep thought about it, and the story is only shown to matter at all to two men. Most men apparently could not care less about the Cinderella story in this world. The incongruence of this is poorly fleshed out, and I did not enjoy it.
I wanted the world to be so much deeper; I wanted to hear more about the resistance effort, which is pitched as tiny and unable to effect change but is somehow suddenly large and well equipt enough to complete the coup once the evil King has died? The book ends with Constance (who is apparently the rightful heir though this is not touched on at all earlier in the book), setting up a whole new government in a way that is not at all earned. That could have been so powerful if we had seen her and a group of rebels debating how the world should work, or if she had talked to Sophia about her plans for a better future. And how amazing would this book have been if there had been an underground group of women trying to alleviate the suffering of their fellow citizens? It would have been kickass. Instead, we get literally 85% of the book with only three women showing interest in overthrowing their own oppression, then suddenly, in the end, they magically make the world better, and everyone is happy? I just really didn't click with this part of the book.

Plot
This could entirely be because this book is written for an audience much younger than I am, but I found this book so predictable. The King is Prince Charming doing necromancy; the Fairy Godmother is his mother, Sophia just happens to find a diary that has been hidden for 200 years that apparently gives her legitimacy with the rest of the Kingdom and tells her the secret to defeating the King. I was unsurprised by these twists and didn't find the timing of the reveals compelling. The romance suffers hard for instalove and from what my brain conceptualized as the Rosaline/Juliet problem. Sophia is in love with Erin (who I think was done so dirty by the plot, but I will address this later) then meets Constance is almost immediately is enraptured by her. Which is fine, Constance is much nicer to Sophia; it is just so rushed and didn't work for me.
The ending was incredibly unbelievable for me. I did not feel that it had been earned at all. Sophia kills the King, a mob of 40 angry men comes at her, and they are deterred by Constance with a dagger. How is a mob of 40 people going to be stopped by one person? Seems wild. All the issues are magically fixed, and we just hear about all the societal change that happened. Society does a complete 180, and it is entirely off the page. It reminded me a lot of the ending of Again, But Better, which I also super did not like.

Characters
My biggest issue with the characters in this book is that they are almost all very one-note. Sophia has a character arc and is a totally fine narrator, but basically, every other character fell flat for me. The only issue I had with Sophia was that she massively suffers from being incredibly unique. She is the only woman or girl throughout most of the book who thinks their oppression is bad; she is not like everyone else who is just fine living in this terrible world; no one understands. I am very over this trope; it must work for some people because it continues to be written. It is not until 87% of the way through the book that we learn of other loan actors trying to escape the King.
Most of the men in the book are cartoonishly evil. There are a total of four men who are not evil in this book, I get the villains being predominantly male, but they all feel cartoonishly evil in a way that just doesn't make me believe the world. The King is so flat that I kind of just didn't care what he was up to, he's just doing the evil thing because he is evil. I knew he was going to die; I felt absolutely no tension, so I wasn't interested in his story.
The part that I found most off-putting was the way women in abusive relationships were written. They all read like caricatures of battered women, no agency, no desire of a different life; they are just miserable plot tools. I cannot imagine reading this book as someone who had been in an abusive relationship and not feeling baffled at the portrayal of these women. They are entirely helpless, and none of them are shown to do anything to affect their own lives.

The writing
I actually don't have much to say about the writing! It is totally solid; my only complaint is that I don't think Bayron wrote tension very well. I wasn't a huge fan of the writing style, but it isn't bad. It is just a lot of telling and not a lot of showing.

I clearly did not really enjoy reading this book, but I hope that if you read it as well, you had a better experience of it. I completely want every book I read to be my new favorite and am disappointed that I did not enjoy this book. Just because it was not for me does not mean it will not work for you.


Cinderella is Dead is published on July 7th, 2020.

I raced through this Cinderella retelling! In Sophia's fairytale world, ever since Cinderella died, the King(s) have ruled the state of Lille with force and coercion. Women have little to no rights or agency and their only goal in life is to be chosen to be wed to an eligible man during the annual ball. Not only does Sophia reject the way women and men are matched in Lille, she doesn't want a husband because she is gay, a social taboo. Sophia was an easy protagonist to root for - spunky, fearless, clever, outspoken, and ready to tear down the patriarchal system. I will definitely be adding this to my Middle/High School library, and recommend to collections where fantasy or fractured fairytales are popular.

There were a lot of things to love about this book. I absolutely loved the twist on the original Cinderella story and the fact that every single aspect of the well known fairy tale was dissected and torn apart. I loved the fact that this fairy tale was not what it appeared to be, which is the case with most fairytales, I am sure. I thought Sophia was a fantastic character. She was headstrong and stubborn and completely determined to be able to make her own choices about who to marry and who to love. She is in love with her best friend, Erin, and would rather spend her life with her than be forced into marriage with some man she hardly knows and who will most likely treat her like she is a piece of his property.

So there were a few issues I had with the story, which is why I am giving it three stars instead of four. One issue I had was the insta-love that Sophia felt towards Constance. At the beginning of the story. Sophia is SO in love with Erin, but then it seems as though those feelings are completely forgotten when she meets Constance. I do understand Sophia's reasons for why she felt that Erin wasn't good for her, but it felt like her relationship with Constance happened way too quickly and it felt forced to me. I also felt that the world building was a little lacking. I didn't fully understand why Prince Charming did the things he did and why he created the laws that he did. His motives didn't make sense at all and he just wasn't a well developed villain. The whole patriarchy society also started to become a little too much. It felt weird that there wasn't a single decent man in the entire kingdom. Why would the King's rules make it so that EVERY man in the kingdom felt the need to treat women like crap? That part also felt a little forced to me.

I did think the book was pretty good and worth a read. I just wish certain things had been done better.

When I read: "Queer black girls overthrowing the patriarchy" I WAS SOLD! I didn't even read the rest of the synopsis. I immediately asked Net Galley for a chance to read this and was so happy to get approved. Thank you Net Galley and Bloomsbury YA for the opportunity.

Cinderella is Dead is a dynamic debut novel by Kalynn Baryon that drastically re-invents the Cinderella tale, In the land of Mersailles, Prince Manford rules with an iron fist: he has declared women as property with no rights and teen girls must attend an annual ball when they come of age. At the ball, a girl can be selected for marriage and if she is not, she is deemed "forfeit" and becomes property of the king. As propaganda, the tale of Cinderella is ingrained at an early age to bolster how Prince Charming "rescued" Cinderella from a life of poverty and elevated her as queen.

Sophia Grimmins wants to nothing to do with the ball and is in love with her best friend Erin. She wants to run away with her but is forced to become part of a revolution after a series of events forces her to flee from the ball. She meets Constance, the last known descendant of Cinderella - who tells her truth and encourages her to find the strength to be herself.

REVIEW: I read this book in a few hours. It was wholly engrossing and totally transported me to a different world. Bayron did a fantastic job of painting a world of oppression --you can really feel the terror/ claustrophobia that Sophia felt and how small women were made to feel in this society. I also loved how Sophia, a queer Black girl, found strength in herself to make the first steps in dismantling this system of oppression. Bayron's writing was awesome with vivid descriptions and great characters. I loved the inclusive world that she made. The story is fantastic with elements of dark magic and a nod to voodoo. There is also a really clever twist that I didn't really see coming! My review won't do it justice, so just read this book for yourself!

P.S. There is a mention of Snow White here (not a spoiler), so I'm hoping Bayron will write about Snow White as well :)

Two hundred years after Cinderella found her happily ever after, every girl in her kingdom is required to attend a ball to find her own Prince Charming. The Cinderella story is gospel, required to be in every household, and every girl is expected to have it memorized on the off chance her suitor husband quizzes her on the contents. Her parents are expected to spend every last penny they can, and more, to make sure she has a ballgown and every piece of finery they can find. Sophia thinks this is a load of crap, and dreams of a country where she can be herself, think for herself, and live in quiet happiness with her princess, but it doesn’t really matter what Sophia thinks.

She is willing to die to try to change that.

I do have to say that this is one of the most unique fairytale retellings I’ve read in a long time. I described this to my friend as “what Cinderella would be if it were kind of a dystopian, diet horror novel.” And overall, I really enjoyed getting to read this. I can’t say that I’ve ever even considered what Cinderella would be like as a dystopian, diet horror novel, but it somehow managed to work well.

Sophia and Constance are great main characters, both well-formed and a rare breed in YA literature—the kind of protagonists that know who they are at the beginning of the book and stay true to their characterization throughout the whole thing. I enjoyed Sophia’s perspective throughout the book and found her to be a very easy heroine to like and to root for.

My quibbles with this book are fairly small, because I’m aware that I’m not the target audience here, and that’s totally fine. I felt like there were way too many instances of being told instead of shown what was going on, but on the other hand... most of the story took place around the Cinderella myth so it kind of made sense to do this? The insta-love was alive and prevalent and it really wasn’t a believable romance, at least not at first. I was rooting for it by the end, but it really felt forced at the beginning. And lastly, I felt like the moral/lesson of the book was a little bit too heavy handed... even for YA lit.

Overall, though, it flowed well and it worked well, and I was able to relax into the story and enjoy it for the very unique and entertaining retelling that it was. I loved the author’s breath of fresh air take on a familiar story and hope to see more like it in the future!

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the early review copy.

okay, so like yay for lesbian rep but this didn't feel cohesive? the story felt strung together instead of written well with pacing and emotions.

also, i don't think the romance was that well fleshed out and the ending was mega rushed. Also, lots and lots and lots of characters just talking through the history.

it was a creative idea but fell a bit flat for me.

You have seen and read Cinderella retellings before, but you need to read this one, trust me. Two hundred years after Cinderella’s death, the kingdom of Mersailles has turned her story into a weapon, stripping women of all their rights and granting absolute power to the king. Sophia is sixteen years old and must attend the annual ball, where “suitors” register a claim for eligible girls. Sophia is not looking for a husband, she’s looking for an escape and trying to get her girlfriend to come with her. A disaster at the ball sends Sophia down a path she never expected that could mean freedom not only for herself, but for all the people of Mersailles.

I thought this was a great weekend read, and highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in YA fantasy, or anyone who enjoyed how Wicked turned The Wizard of Oz on its head.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley for an honest review.

Wow! I don’t know that I could’ve enjoyed a book more. With all that’s been going on in the world, I’ve been in a reading slump. I couldn’t hold on a book for very long. I read this book within a week, and I loved it. This book was suggested on the homepage of netgalley due to the current push to read more Black authors and LGTBQ+ focused books. I’ve always been reading a variety but I’m so glad I got this book. Cinderella is a badass queer Black woman. If that phase offends you, this book isn’t for you. But, if you’re open to this book, you’re going to be On a ride. If you’re like me, and struggling because you’re tired of boring overdone fairy tale retelling. The world of Cinderella has changed. The story is now the Bible of this world. The King has made the ball mandatory and forced women to come, and be chosen by a man to live their lives. If you don’t come, you are forfeit. If you don’t get chosen in 3 tries, you are forfeit. You don’t get love. You don’t get to choose, and if you’re like our main character, you don’t get to love another woman. This begins our journey into a fairy tale world filled with hate, prejudice, and toxic masculinity where two girls, (one who hardcore reminds me of Merida from Brave) decide to fall in love, find a witch and take down the patriarchy. I don’t want to spoil but there’s been at least 2 plot twists I didn’t see coming and I loved it. Please, buy this book. Read this book. Recommend this book. You can bet when it launches I’m buying a copy for me and for a friend. This got me out of my slump and I can’t recommend it more for hope, badass females, the importance of family and the idea that all people deserve to equal rights, equal voices, and an equal chance to live the life they choose.

This was such a strong Cinderella retelling (in a post-Cinderella story world). We get some amazing queer girls overthrowing the patriarchy and a strong battle against the misogyny and homophobia that exists in this dystopian society.

I loved that this book was gay right from the start. Sophia knows who she is, knows what she wants, and she knows that she's going to try to get it. Her society expects her to attend the annual ball where girls must be chosen by men to become their property/wives, but Sophia sees how wrong this is and knows someone must do something or more and more girls will be hurt.

I really loved the fairytale twists in this. This story takes place 200 years after the Cinderella story we know, but that story holds weight in this society and there's lies to what actually happened. The plot of this was what really made the story stand out for me.

The writing was easy to follow, but it was a bit slower paced at times it felt like. I loved the story and characters, but didn't feel the high-stakes pressure in the pacing of the plot.

Overall, I'd definitely recommend this one for someone looking for a story with sapphic girls explicitly fighting a patriarchal system.

Wholly original continuation of the Cinderella story. Some twists I saw coming, and others I very much did not, so I appreciated those surprises (though there was also a bit more on-the-page violence than I was anticipating; specifically the market scene). And of course, the fact that the main character is a Black lesbian was another bonus.

I really wanted to love this book but honestly, I just couldn’t. The world this was set in was by far more interesting than the actual story.

The beginning was super fast paced but nothing happened at all during that time- we went to the ball and then we left the ball. That was it, in 130 pages, that was all we did. Furthermore, the instant love in this book was more like instant lust, which is totally fine, but honestly, how?? Two hours earlier, Sophia was BEGGING her “love” to actually love her, but sure, she’s very attracted to Constance.

We have very little character descriptions by the way, all I know about these characters is hair colour, and I honestly only know that about Constance because it’s a huge part of her family and that story line. Because of that, the characters were very one-dimension and I just couldn’t get into them. I had no interest in their story, nor in the fight they were on.

Furthermore, the story in itself was very convenient. “I don’t like the ball so I’m gonna stop it. Oh look, the “fairy godmother” isn’t what we thought, the whole tale isn’t what we thought actually. Oops, the godmother is actually evil but through her I can kill the king”. Nothing exciting actually happened and the ending was predictable (would it have killed anyone to not have a happily ever after?).

In general, the story had a great premise but the execution could have used some more thought.

Cinderella retelling? Sign me up. But then you tell me it’s a black lesbian “Cinderella” (Sophie), and she’s going to take down the patriarchy? I had to read this and I’m so glad I did. I absolutely loved this book. And am I the only one that kept picturing Constance as Merida from Brave? This needs to be adapted into a movie. Now I have to read everything by Kalynn Bayron

Thank you to Bloomsbury YA and NetGalley for a gifted copy of this ARC. All opinions are my own.

I went into this only knowing that it's a Cinderella retelling featuring a BIPOC character. It has been described as queer black girls overthrowing the patriarchy and I think that's pretty accurate! I LOVED the twist on the beloved Cinderella fairy tale. I thought the author did a fantastic job with that - it was very creative! I love a good dystopian novel and this YA version was very easy to read with kick ass female characters!

If you liked A Curse so Dark and Lonely I think you will be a fan!

I loved this! I will for sure be buying it. It was new and interesting. The book was just different then other stories I've read. The sass levels were great. I thought it was very smart and easy to read. It moved fast and kept me wanting to read the next part without trying it seemed.