CBR Square: Cityscape. Shoutout to the folks who put together the CBR Bingo, because I was wondering where to fit this book, then I looked at the paperback cover and realized it has a cityscape in a shoe outline. I liked this book more than the last Cannonball Reviewer, but it did drag in several placed for me. The Charmed Wife is a retelling of Cinderella, where she’s been married to her Prince for 13.5 years and he’s a cheating horndog. This is hammered home pretty graphically. It starts in the woods where Cinderella is visiting a witch to kill Prince Charming. She slowly starts telling the Witch why the Prince deserves to die. Then her Fairy Godmother shows up to ruin the party.
I did like certain elements of this book even though seeing Cinderella’s naivete play out over the years is pretty painful. There is a section of this book where Cinderella decides her husband has been possessed by a demon and it is up to her to save him that drags on way to long. I thought at one point the situation had finally resolved and then she starts over from the beginning, which was disappointing.
Cinderella leaves her Prince (and her two children) and the plot finally accelerates, but not in very interesting ways. She travels and visits different fairy tale characters to clean their houses, and here the author is trying to make a point, but I am not entirely sure what it is. Then the book starts to blur the line between fantasy and reality. And here I thought things finally got interesting. But not enough to have me recommend this book. If you really love fairy tale retellings you might like this more than I did. The Witch was my favorite. I’d read a book about her, she was much more fun than Cinderella.