★★★★☆ Once upon a time, again

Cinder

Marissa Meyer

I found myself in an oddly detached frame of mind as I read Cinder. I think it was because I quite recently reread Gail Carson Levine's splendid Cinderella retelling Ella Enchanted, as well as Seanan McGuire's Indexing books, which are about folklore. And, most important, I just finished GennaRose Nethercott's Thistlefoot, which, aside from being an absolutely splendid novel, is an extended meditation on how folklore travels through time, and how a folk tale changes with the teller.

Thus, as I read Cinder, I compared it in my mind to all the other Cinderella stories I have read, to the extent that I wasn't really paying as much attention as I normally do to the characters and their motivations. This would feel like the wrong way to read the book, except that Marissa Meyer so clearly encourages the reader to see Cinder as a version of Cinderella and to compare it with the classic Aschenputtel. It is of course a fool's errand to try to identify the "original version" of any folktale. But being foolish for a moment, Aschenputtel is about as close as we come to an original version of Cinderella.

In fact, in Meyer's telling Aschenputtel survives the transition from 19th-century Germany to the postapocalyptic Eastern Commonwealth almost intact. Most of the main beats of Aschenputtel's story show up in Cinder. (By the way, there is no Fairy Godmother in Aschenputtel, and her dancing slippers are not glass -- you can thank Disney for those embellishments.) Of course, the original Aschenputtel is not a cyborg, but by making her one Meyer faithfully reproduces her relationship to her stepmother and stepsisters.

Cinder differs from Aschenputtel mainly in its larger context. Cinder and Prince Kai live in a political world, and, as the publisher's blurb tells us, Cinder "finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle".

Cinder is the first book of The Lunar Chronicles, which continue with more fairy tale retellings: Scarlet (Red Riding Hood), Cress (Rapunzel), and Winter (Snow White). She tells us in the end matter that as the story goes on we will see all these characters working together. It is that surrounding political context that creates the plot opportunity for them to do this.

The Lunar Chronicles remind me of a TV series I quite liked, Once Upon a Time . In that series, a bunch of classic fairy tales are bundled up together into a single larger story, with interesting twists. Just as Cinderella becomes a cyborg for Cinder, Red Riding Hood becomes a werewolf in Once Upon a Time .

This was probably not the best way to read Cinder. But I had fun with it, so I can't say I much regret the way it happened for me.

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