Cinderella Is Dead / Kalynn Bayron

1/5

The first thing I noticed about Cinderella Is Dead is that it is written nearly entirely in simple sentences, but I'd heard such good reviews about the novel that I pushed passed the choppy, bland writing style. The next thing I noticed is that all of the characters are flat archetypes of a single trait. Sophia, the lead, is supposed to be "defiant," but I found her character boring and unoriginal. She isn't particularly bright either; imagine her as Sorcery of Thorns's Elizabeth mockery. The "villainous" king is written without artistry or effort; his lines and his blatant mistreatment of the commoners are straight from the "evil" playbook. And the "rebellious" love interest's dialogue is just as bland. It's a classic girl-living-under-a-tyrant meets rebel leader and falls in love with how cool and rebellious the love interest is (see Under the Never Sky, Rossi).

My final issue with the novel is the complete lack of ambiguity. There is no gray area. The setup is that women have no power and must attend a ball where men can essentially buy any attendee as a wife and treat her any way he wants. There's literally nothing else to it. The novel is a complete simplification of gender inequality and takes the moral or ethical gray areas, which are the fun and interesting and complex areas, of this topic out of the discussion. This, coupled with the simple writing that told more than showed, made the novel very boring. I stopped at reading at ~45%.

I wished it had met the hype and my hopes. Reviews praised Cinderella Is Dead for its diversity and originality, but honestly if I hadn't read the reviews I wouldn't have noticed many points for diversity other than a few LGBT characters, which were used strongly for plot. Making the Cinderella fairytale a sort of religion and/or law in the novel could have been a strong point, but wasn't really focused on; it wasn't any different from a kingdom story where the tyrant enforces a certain type of religion and/or law.

Try it if you're curious about the hype or if you want a same-sex romance, but keep your standards low in terms of execution, complexity, and originality.