Stepsister. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Stepsister by Jennifer Donnelly

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Don’t just fracture the fairy tale.
Shatter it.
Isabelle should be blissfully happy-she’s about to win the handsome prince. Except Isabelle isn’t the beautiful girl who lost the glass slipper and captured the prince’s heart. She’s the ugly stepsister who cut off her toes to fit into Cinderella’s shoe…which is now filling with blood.
Isabelle tried to fit in. She cut away pieces of herself in order to become pretty. Sweet. More like Cinderella. But that only made her mean, jealous, and hollow. Now she has a chance to alter her destiny and prove what ugly stepsisters have always known: it takes more than heartache to break a girl.
Evoking the darker, original version of the Cinderella story, Stepsister shows us that ugly is in the eye of the beholder, and uses Jennifer Donnelly’s trademark wit and wisdom to send an overlooked character on a journey toward empowerment, redemption…and a new definition of beauty.
BLURB: Stepsister

A Fairytale that begins with the heroine chopping off a few toes.

This was pretty awesome, it was Cinderella’s ugly Stepsister’s tale from the moment the Prince came doe to door having all the village maidens trying on the glass slipper. The stepmother has one stepdaughter, Tavia chop off part of her heel and our heroine Isabelle chop off a few toes to try to fit the shoe on. Both girls start bleeding into the shoe before they make it into the prince’s carriage though.

The entire village finds out what they did and how they had been treating Ella, so they are outcasts. After a few years go by, Isabelle’s Mother is suffering from dimentia, they have sold off most of their belongings including her horse Nero. They have an old horse Martin left, their home and not much else.

I don’t want to give away spoilers but there are some magical elements that are directing and/or interfering in Isabelle’s life as she looks upon her life and sees how it all went wrong. She remembers being happy as a child and being friends with Elle and the groom Felix, and playing at being a warrior. She wonders how it all changed to jealousy and dresses and balls.

The story is truly a fairytale with a fairy godmother, magic, a prince and princess. There are evil villains and the heroine is actually a heroine and she falls in love. I really enjoyed the book and laughed during parts.

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