Review: Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron

ARC provided by the publisher through NetGalley.

Cinderella is Dead has an excellent pitch, and I went in ready to LOVE it. Queer Black girls destroy the patriarchy. That one line absolutely sold me, and if it sold you too, then I would not discourage you from grabbing a copy and seeing if you love it the way I wanted to. Alas, I did not enjoy the book very much.

Cinderella is Dead is set in the world of Cinderella, but she has been dead for 200 years. Her story is mandated to be read by every woman in the Kingdom, and they all must attend a ball at the age of 16 to find a husband. Our main character is Sophia, a 16-year-old Black girl who would much rather find a princess than a prince and live happily ever after with her. Again, I love everything about the pitch. Here is the blurb from Goodreads:

It’s 200 years after Cinderella found her prince, but the fairy tale is over. Teen girls are now required to appear at the Annual Ball, where the men of the kingdom select wives based on a girl’s display of finery. If a suitable match is not found, the girls not chosen are never heard from again.

Sixteen-year-old Sophia would much rather marry Erin, her childhood best friend, than parade in front of suitors. At the ball, Sophia makes the desperate decision to flee, and finds herself hiding in Cinderella’s mausoleum. There, she meets Constance, the last known descendant of Cinderella and her step sisters. Together they vow to bring down the king once and for all–and in the process, they learn that there’s more to Cinderella’s story than they ever knew . . .

This fresh take on a classic story will make readers question the tales they’ve been told, and root for girls to break down the constructs of the world around them.

Worldbuilding

This part of the book really fell flat for me, I wanted to find the world interesting, but we get so little nuance of the world it is really hard to be emersed in. I found it very one-note and kept being pulled out of the story because I was questioning, "how can this actually work?" over and over. I found it utterly bizarre that basically all women mindlessly follow the story of Cinderella with no deep thought about it, and the story is only shown to matter at all to two men. Most men apparently could not care less about the Cinderella story in this world. The incongruence of this is poorly fleshed out, and I did not enjoy it.

The story is set in a generic fairytale land, I do not object to this outright as I really liked the world of A School for Good and Evil, but I did not like the execution of this world. It did not feel rooted in any way, I kept being pulled out of the story because I was questioning the world's veracity. Everything is tied to the Cinderella story but fully half of the world are shown to not care about the Cinderella story. I also think I didn't click well with the portrayal of an oppressive government or the overthrowing of said government because I just got done studying this in grad school and it doesn't really match successful revolutions. So I didn't connect to the fiction enough to not think about it through the lens of a student.

I wanted the world to be so much deeper; I wanted to hear more about the resistance effort, which is pitched as tiny and unable to effect change but is somehow suddenly large and well equipped enough to complete the coup once the evil King has died? The book ends with Constance (who is apparently the rightful heir though this is not touched on at all earlier in the book), setting up a whole new government in a way that is not at all earned. That could have been so powerful if we had seen her and a group of rebels debating how the world should work, or if she had talked to Sophia about her plans for a better future. And how amazing would this book have been if there had been an underground group of women trying to alleviate the suffering of their fellow citizens? It would have been kickass. Instead, we get literally 85% of the book with only three women showing interest in overthrowing their own oppression, then suddenly, in the end, they magically make the world better, and everyone is happy? I just really didn't click with this part of the book.

Plot (skip this section to avoid spoilers)

This could entirely be because this book is written for an audience much younger than I am, but I found this book so predictable. The King is Prince Charming doing necromancy; the Fairy Godmother is his mother, Sophia just happens to find a diary that has been hidden for 200 years that apparently gives her legitimacy with the rest of the Kingdom and tells her the secret to defeating the King. I was unsurprised by these twists and didn't find the timing of the reveals compelling. The romance suffers hard for instalove and from what my brain conceptualized as the Rosaline/Juliet problem. Sophia is in love with Erin (who I think was done so dirty by the plot, but I will address this later) then meets Constance is almost immediately is enraptured by her. Which is fine, Constance is much nicer to Sophia; it is just so rushed and didn't work for me.

The ending was incredibly unbelievable for me. I did not feel that it had been earned at all. Sophia kills the King, a mob of 40 angry men comes at her, and they are deterred by Constance with a dagger. How is a mob of 40 people going to be stopped by one person? Seems wild. All the issues are magically fixed, and we just hear about all the societal change that happened. Society does a complete 180, and it is entirely off the page. It reminded me a lot of the ending of Again, But Better, which I also super did not like.

Characters

My biggest issue with the characters in this book is that they are almost all very one-note. Sophia has a character arc and is a totally fine narrator, but basically, every other character fell flat for me. The only issue I had with Sophia was that she massively suffers from being incredibly unique. She is the only woman or girl throughout most of the book who thinks their oppression is bad; she is not like everyone else who is just fine living in this terrible world; no one understands. I am very over this trope; it must work for some people because it continues to be written. It is not until 87% of the way through the book that we learn of other lone actors trying to escape the King.

This paragraph also contains spoilers, you will be warned a sentence before. Most of the men in the book are cartoonishly evil. There are a total of four men who are not evil in this book, I get the villains being predominantly male, but they all feel cartoonishly evil in a way that just doesn't make me believe the world. Skip to the next paragraph to avoid spoilers. The King is so flat that I kind of just didn't care what he was up to, he's just doing the evil thing because he is evil. I knew he was going to die; I felt absolutely no tension, so I wasn't interested in his story.

The part that I found most off-putting was the way women in abusive relationships were written. They all read like caricatures of battered women, no agency, no desire of a different life; they are just miserable plot tools. I cannot imagine reading this book as someone who had been in an abusive relationship and not feeling baffled and hurt at the portrayal of these women. They are entirely helpless, and none of them are shown to do anything to affect their own lives.

The writing

I actually don't have much to say about the writing! It is totally solid; my only complaint is that I don't think Bayron wrote tension very well. I wasn't a huge fan of the writing style, but it isn't bad. It is just a lot of telling and not a lot of showing.

I clearly did not really enjoy reading this book, but I hope that if you read it as well, you had a better experience of it. I completely want every book I read to be my new favorite and am disappointed that I did not enjoy this book. Just because it was not for me does not mean it will not work for you.

I gave this book 2 stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I think I will read this author’s next book if I like the premise but I will read reviews before making that decision.

Cinderella is Dead is published on July 7th, 2020.