and four white mice will never be four white horses
Which is the reaction I have every time I remember the title of the book I read yesterday, Impossible by Nancy Werlin. Though it is not actually about Cinderella; it's a YA novel based around the ballad "Scarborough Fair."
I'm not wholly sure how I feel about it; it was a diverting way to spend the evening, but I didn't feel completely drawn in by the world or the characters, who didn't seem as fully drawn as I like (particularly the villain of the piece). (Though when I write, I spend *chapters* on the characters doing nothing much in particular but interacting, so take that with a grain of salt, perhaps.) What I *did* quite like was the amount of time the characters spent on trying to figure out how to break the riddling curse, the way they test out different options and run experiments, so that it was absolutely clear at the end how this was going to happen (unlike in, say, Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, which I adore, but have read several times and still have no idea what's actually happening at the end. If anyone knows, could you tell me?). And I liked the physicality of that as well.
Fans of stories based on ballads like "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer" might want to give it a try, though they might be disappointed if they go in expecting the more concrete worlds of Pamela Dean or Ellen Kushner or Elizabeth Marie Pope.
I'm not wholly sure how I feel about it; it was a diverting way to spend the evening, but I didn't feel completely drawn in by the world or the characters, who didn't seem as fully drawn as I like (particularly the villain of the piece). (Though when I write, I spend *chapters* on the characters doing nothing much in particular but interacting, so take that with a grain of salt, perhaps.) What I *did* quite like was the amount of time the characters spent on trying to figure out how to break the riddling curse, the way they test out different options and run experiments, so that it was absolutely clear at the end how this was going to happen (unlike in, say, Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, which I adore, but have read several times and still have no idea what's actually happening at the end. If anyone knows, could you tell me?). And I liked the physicality of that as well.
Fans of stories based on ballads like "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer" might want to give it a try, though they might be disappointed if they go in expecting the more concrete worlds of Pamela Dean or Ellen Kushner or Elizabeth Marie Pope.