The charmed wife

Title:

The charmed wife

Author:

Grushin, Olga, 1971- author.

Personal Author:

Grushin, Olga, 1971- author.

ISBN:

9780593085509

Physical Description:

275 pages ; 24 cm

Abstract:

"Cinderella married the man of her dreams--the perfect ending she deserved after diligently following all the fairy-tale rules. Yet now, two children and thirteen and a half years later, things have gone badly wrong and her life is far from perfect. One night, fed up, she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the Witch who, for a price, offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron, Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming"-- Provided by publisher.

Cinderella married the man of her dreams--the perfect ending. Yet now, two children and thirteen and a half years later, things have gone badly wrong and her life is far from perfect. One night she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the Witch who, for a price, offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron, Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming. Instead, she wants him dead. -- adapted from jacket

Subject Term:

Cinderella (Tale) -- Adaptations.

Magic realism (Literature) -- Fiction.

Marriage -- Fiction.

Man-woman relationships -- Fiction.

Witches -- Fiction.

Charms -- Fiction.

Fairy tales -- Fiction.

Genre:

Paranormal romance stories.

Fantasy fiction.

Paranormal fiction.

Romance fiction.

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
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Summary

"Genre-bending and darkly comic, Grushin's fourth novel is a weird and wonderful triumph." - O, the Oprah Magazine

Cinderella wants her Prince Charming dead in this sophisticated fairy-tale for the twenty-first century.

Cinderella married the man of her dreams--the perfect ending she deserved after diligently following all the fairy-tale rules. Yet now, thirteen and a half years later, things have gone badly wrong and her life is far from perfect. One night, fed up and exhausted, she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the Witch who, for a price, offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron, Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming. Instead, she wants him dead.

Endlessly surprising, wildly inventive, and decidedly modern, The Charmed Wife weaves together time and place, fantasy and reality, to conjure a world unlike any other. Nothing in it is quite what it seems--the twists and turns of its magical, dark, and swiftly shifting paths take us deep into the heart of what makes us unique, of romance and marriage, and of the very nature of storytelling.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

The author of Forty Rooms (2016) takes on Cinderella. "Cinderella" is one of the most-often-told tales in the world. In this iteration of the familiar story, the heroine has been married to her prince long enough to want to murder him. Grushin is not the first to wonder what comes after happily-ever-after, of course, and she's aware of this. She uses the last stanza of Anne Sexton's "Cinderella" as an epigram. This may not have been a wise choice, as Sexton's 10 lines are ultimately more satisfying than Grushin's 288 pages. This novel occupies an uncomfortable place between realism, postmodernism, and folklore. Part of the appeal of Cinderella--part of the appeal of all folkloric heroines--is that she's a blank screen onto which we can project our own selves and our own desires. This sort of protagonist works for long enough to sustain a fairy tale, but a novel typically requires a protagonist who emerges as a real person. Grushin's Cinderella has enough of an inner life to make her specific--rather than universal--but not enough to emerge as a fully developed character. There's an analogous issue of narrative voice. Fairy tales don't feel like pure exposition because they are set in an eternal past and because they are short. Grushin isn't the first author to try to refresh this style by adding a surfeit of adjectives and metaphors, but neither is she more successful than her predecessors. Maybe the most noteworthy thing about this novel is that its author has already written a much better one that asks the questions it seems to want to pose. Forty Rooms was, among other things, an extended meditation on what autonomy, identity, and purpose mean for women. It's also worth noting that when working with--against?--the formal constraints of a story set in Soviet Russia and suburban America, Grushin conjures more magic than she does in the fantasy world of this novel. It's not hard to understand the temptation to rework this oft-told tale, but the result of this exercise is disappointing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.