A retelling of ‘Cinderella’ from A Fairy Tale Revolution, a series designed to breathe new life into old stories, for modern girls and boys
Rebecca Solnit retells ‘Cinderella’. A Fairy Tale Revolution is here to remix and revive our favourite stories.
‘She looked like a girl who was evening, and an evening that had become a girl…’
In the kitchen, in her rags, Cinderella, longs to go to the ball. After all, there is nothing worse than not being invited to the party. Enter her fairy godmother...
But that is where the familiar story ends. Cinderella's transformation turns out to be much less about ballgowns, glass slippers and carriages, and much more about finding her truest self. Finally free from the kitchen cinders, who will she turn out to be?
About the Author
Writer, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Whose Story Is This?, Call Them By Their True Names (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). Her forthcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is scheduled for release in March 2020. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub.
About the Illustrator
Arthur Rackham (1867–1939) was an English illustrator, recognised as a leading figure in the Golden Age of British book illustration. Specialising in pen and ink, as well as watercolour, some of his best-known works include his illustrations for Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Industry Reviews
[Solnit] recasts this familiar story into a tale that is fundamentally about freedom. The decision to use Arthur Rackham's original cut-paper silhouette illustrations was a brilliant choice. This is, hands down, a wonderful book - one that even the jaded reader will clasp upon completion with a contented sigh
* New York Times *
Solnit retells the classic story in a way that liberates each character from the constrictions imposed upon him or her by someone else's story and confers upon each the dignity of a complete human being with agency and autonomous dreams. Emerging from these simply worded, profound, richly rewarding pages is Solnit the literary artist, Solnit the revolutionary, Solnit the enchanter, Solnit the subtle and endlessly delightful satirist, Solnit the sage
* Brainpickings *
This is a reminder of hope and possibility, of kindness and compassion, and-perhaps most salient-imagination and liberty. Through the imaginations of our childhoods, can we find our true selves liberated in adulthood?
Solnit is, in many ways, our fairy godmother. With the tap of her pen and fervor of her imagination, she has transformed a beloved but morally outdated classic into a powerful narrative of female agency with a moral compass we can all believe in
Cinderella Liberator is a stunning example of how talking lizards, cakes, misguided stepsisters, and even a prince Nevermind can reframe some of our most iconic traditional narratives, and is a beautifully refreshing wind of change in the arid desert of modern-minded children's stories.
