Godmother

by Carolyn Turgeon

A new take on Cinderella, told from the perspective of the fairy godmother living in modern-day Manhattan

Lil is an old woman who spends her days shelving rare books in a tiny Manhattan bookstore and lonely nights at home in her apartment. But Lil has an intriguing secret. Tucked and bound behind her back are white feathery wings--the only key to who she once was: the fairy godmother responsible for getting Cinderella to the ball to unite with her Prince Charming.

But on that fateful night, something went terribly and beautifully wrong. Lil allowed herself the unthinkable: to feel the emotions of human beings and fall in love with the prince herself, going to the ball in place of Cinderella in her exquisitely gorgeous human guise. For her unforgivable mistake, she was banished to live among humans, far from her fairy sisters and their magical underwater world. But then one day she meets Veronica--a young, fair-skinned, flame-haired East Village beauty with a love of all things vintage and a penchant for falling in love with the wrong men--and suddenly it becomes clear to Lil that she’s been given a chance at redemption. If she can find a soul mate for Veronica, she may be able to right her wrong and return to the fairy world she so deeply longs for.

• ISBN10: 0307452603
• ISBN13: 9780307452603
• Publish Date: 3 March 2009
• Publish Status: Active
• Imprint: Three Rivers Press (CA)
• Format: eBook
• Pages: 171
• Language: English

Reviews

[ibeforem]

I chose this as a palate cleanser after my last read, and it didn't quite end up as I expected.

This starts out as sort of a retelling of Cinderella, except something has gone terribly wrong. Lil, Cinderella's fairy godmother, fell in love with the Prince instead of Cinderella, and for her troubles she is banished from the fairy kingdom, doomed to live her days in New York City. When she happens upon the opportunity to set up her boss with a young lady she met, she believes setting true love right will be her key back to the kingdom.

The story goes back and forth between present day Lil and fairy Lil, preparing to get Cinderella to the ball. I actually found the fairy parts less interesting, and ended up skimming pieces that didn't seem important to the story. I enjoyed the present day story more, even if Lil did a bit of wandering and acted inconsistently at times. One silly thing that bothered me was that one minute she would be doing something that required money, and the next she would be talking about how she couldn't even afford to buy herself a full meal at the diner.

I will give the author credit -- I didn't see the twist coming until it was practically there. Things got very dark, very quickly, and it was unexpected! In hindsight, I maybe should have seen it, but my ability to suspend disbelief is strong.

Overall, this wasn't bad, but it wasn't what I expected. So if you're expecting a happy love story, you might want to look somewhere else....

[ladygrey]

There's a faint quality of beauty to the story, especially in the fairy flashbacks. But the narrative is also overly steeped in simile which at times just feels like it's trying too hard. I liked the idea of a godmother who falls in love with the prince but found her actually incredibly unsympathetic. I quickly tired of her whining and grousing about everything she'd lost and how sad and lost she was. I didn't ever want her and the prince to end up happily ever after and kept asking what happened to Cinderella. And yet as the story progressed and took on darker allusions I found it kind of interesting. I didn't like the ties to the prosaic world at the end but I did like the places where the fairy world entered into the prosaic in the end. I don't think I ever liked Lil. For all her need to help people I found her incredibly self absorbed. But I definitely liked Veronica and I think I really liked her grandmother.

And for all the things I didn't like about this story, I found that it lingers; that the emotion of her world clung to me for a while which means she must have done something right.