Review: Modernized Cinderella Throwback
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 30, 2014
I am a sucker for fairy tales and know quite a bit about them, as I've mentioned previously, so if there's a version of a tale, I'll read it.To read this, and other book reviews, visit my website:[...]Ava Smith's Cinderella Girl is a familiar fairy tale modernized, yet not due to a costume ball. The aspects to the tale that were retained were quite good. I enjoyed that there was a bird involved, albeit it toward the very end, as birds played a large role in one of the earliest renditions of the tale to notify the prince of sisterly deceit.I quite enjoyed the manifestation of the "fairy godmother" as a lovable little man, Albert Tiddle. Quirky, older men are always entertaining.I didn't really have a connection to any of the characters. They were basic shells that relied heavily upon prior knowledge of the fairy tale. Going along with being a shell, the character's weren't fully fleshed out and their reactions, ie. fast turn around for someone like Lucy from being cruel to understanding, were not quite in the believable realm--even with suspension of disbelief. I'm willing to go along with the insta-love aspect for Tom and Briony, because that's what Cinderella and Prince Charming have...and that's the fairy tale THING to do with respect to love...but other than their quick "development," the characters fell rather flat.This could use a thorough editing, for both grammar as well as story holes. There was one particular instance where Briony had a tray in her hands and the next sentence said that she was using both her hands to carry a basket of laundry. How? Where did the tray magically go? And for the grammar, how can you have a serial list and not have one single comma? You can't--somehow all of those things have now combined to make one large new thing that has never been heard of before. The formatting was also a bit wonky, which at times had speech that belonged to one person but it appeared on the page to be attributed to someone else.