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.
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.
