The Charmed Wife

The Charmed Wife / Olga Grushin
NY: Putnam, 2021.
288 p.

I grabbed this one when it came into my library, as I'm a fan of Olga Grushin's writing, and I do like a good fairy tale retelling. However, I wasn't thoroughly convinced by this book. 

The cover is a good indication of the story; our main character, Cinderella, is stuck in her marriage after 13 and a half years and two children. She tries to find a way out but always comes back to where she started. As the book opens, she's sneaking out to the crossroads at midnight to find a crone who will curse her husband and free her of him. But does she really want to? 

That's the question that haunts this book. What does Cinderella actually want? How is she herself culpable in this miserable, joyless life she's leading, one that is supposed to be the apex of a charmed life? There are some serious, heavy questions at the heart of this book.

There is much to entertain the reader here - elements of other fairytales and characters to recognize, truth to sort out among various interpretations by different characters, and so on. But I felt it leaned too heavily on other retellings, in particular, the Disney movie interpretations. There are a pair of mice who accompany Cinderella to the palace, which is full of teapot servants and the like. And the mouse subplot seems strange, until one reaches the end and sees how important mice are to the life of human beings and worlds. 

But the main failing of my reading experience was the conclusion, which felt perilously close to the "it was all a dream" pitfall. Although it does make sense in a way, it wasn't quite satisfying enough for me. Perhaps I wasn't in the right mood when I picked this one up, but it felt a little fey to me.