“Cinderella is Dead” (2020) by Kalynn Bayron is a teen novel that takes place 200 years after the death of Cinderella. The palace-approved story of Cinderella, what in our world is known as the Disney version, has become a kind of holy book used to keep girls and women in their place, a fairy tale turned into a handmaid’s tale. Because you know that is just how it would go. But it gets worse: the Disney version is not even true! Everything is based on lies! The book ends with the true story of Cinderella.
The heroine, Sophia Grimmins, a 16-year-old Black girl, begins to question the lies she has been fed all her life when she is forced to marry a prince instead of a princess! While on the run from the king and the king’s men, she discovers the truth bit by bit until she finds herself in Cinderella’s old room in the castle and discovers her – journal.
The book ends with Bayron’s main point:
“Be a light in the dark.”
Bayron:
“When I sat down to draft Cinderella is Dead I started with a few questions: What effect do the fairy tales we are told as children have on us? What happens to our view of the world when the characters in these stories don’t look like us or love like us? When do we get to be heroes of our own stories?”
Bayron herself appears to be Black but not lesbian. There is a PG-13 lesbian love story in it, but the book is not so much about homophobia as sexism:
Sexism: In the palace-approved text, Cinderella met Prince Charming at a ball and lived happily ever after. And so every year the palace holds a ball attended by girls from ages 16 to 18 so that they too can meet their own Prince Charmings and live happily ever after! But if by 18 they are not married or engaged, they are “forfeited” and sold off into forced labour ~ or something ~ never to be heard from again. But even married, a woman can be beat up by her husband or even forfeited. And fathers can forfeit their daughters. This gives men all the power, with predictably disastrous consequences. This leads even Well-Meaning Parents to tell their daughters to be realistic, to play it safe, to shrink themselves down into almost nothing for the benefit of men.
Racism is not brought up, but then again Cinderella’s kingdom is even less racist than Bridgerton! But it is imagined as Black-majority. Cinderella herself is White, for example, but Prince Charming and the Fairy Godmother are not.
Evil: Even though some characters are cartoonishly evil, as you might expect, and many others go along with evil because they personally benefit (male privilege), most people are simply too afraid to speak up or stand up, to “be a light”. Thus all those parental lectures of “We just want to keep you safe.” By far the most realistic part of the book.
– Abagond, 2021.
See also:
- books – books I read in 2021
- The Handmaid’s Tale
- Bridgerton
- Wicked – another reimagined fairy tale
- What if there were a Black Default?
- Elizabeth Eckford – of the Little Rock 9, who discovered that only 10% were hardcore racists, but they cowed the other 90% into line.
- White Evangelicals and the US border camps – religion perverted in real time
- Does the Bible say that slavery is wrong?
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Abagond 
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