Fantasy · Romance · YA

So This Is Love by Elizabeth Lim

Lori Carroll
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The series, A Twisted Tale, looks at Disney fairy tales and asks a question. For So This Is Love, the question is “What if Cinderella never tried on the glass slipper?” It should be noted that this series is published by Disney and therefore the re-tellings are based solely on the Disney movies, not the actual fairy tales. 

Grade: 3

In this book, we are given a backstory to the Fairy Godmother and why she put the midnight ruling on Cinderella’s evening out. Magic has been forbidden in the kingdom and the Fairy Godmother was pushing her luck even giving her those few hours.  Later, when Cinderella doesn’t try on the shoe, her Stepmother decides to sell her to a slaver. Cinderella runs away and is befriended by a maid in the castle who gets her a job working with her. Of course, once the Stepmother is removed as the villian we need a new big bad to work against our couple. Enter The Duke. After working for the Royal family for years, The Duke has decided he would be a much better ruler.

There is good and bad in using the Disney movie as the base for the book. The mental images we have from the movie help make the story come to life.  For me, it gave me several moments of pause when trying to correlate the Cinderella we are reading about with the movie version. We don’t really get to see Cinderella’s personality in the movie, but in the book we do, and I can’t say that the two met up for me.

We didn’t get much of the talking animals in this book, which is strange considering how integral to the story that portion was.

I’m not typically a fan of having the POV of the villians, but I think in this book it worked. It gave the story more depth so you could understand what was going on around our heroes.

Overall, the book was interesting. Having a Disney story go dark with the threat of slave trade so quickly in the book was not expected, but that dark theme did not carry through the rest of the book.  It ultimately felt like the authors had a story to tell and the confines of the Disney movie didn’t fit within their idea, but they forced it.

Bottom Line: Neither good nor bad. Left me feeling meh.

Lori Carroll

Lori Carroll

Owner at Jan's
Starting late in life reading, Lori made up for it by becoming a voracious reader. Recently she bought an established bookstore in Beaverton, OR and now spends her day surrounded by nothing but books and booklovers!
Lori Carroll

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