Cinderella - A Retelling with Strength and Courage
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Cinderella
A Retelling with Strength and Courage
Courageous Heroine Fairy Tales Book 1
Lisa Shea
Copyright © 2016 by Lisa Shea / Minerva Webworks LLC
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Lisa Shea.
Book design by Lisa Shea
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warm thanks to my entire review team who has worked with me on this book for the years I’ve been developing it!
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Believe in yourself
Cinderella – A Retelling with Strength and Courage
Introduction
This wife brought two daughters
into the house with her.
They were beautiful, with fair faces,
but evil and dark hearts.
~ The Brothers Grimm
In modern times, we tend to think of the Brothers Grimm as collecting kids’ stories. However, nothing could be further from the truth. When Jacob and Wilhelm were gathering their tales in Germany in the early 1800s, they were striving to preserve the oral tradition of traditional lumberjacks, hard-working seamstresses, and weary farmers. These “volk” (folk, traditional-culture) adults, after a long, hard day of work, would gather with their ale and bread by the fire and share stories to pass the time. In those days before TV and Internet, a good story was worth its weight in gold.
The tales were not gentle and they were not tame. Rapunzel lowered her hair in order to enjoy nights of passion with her lover. A maid is punished by being put into a nail-studded barrel and rolled until she dies. In another, a child is disobedient - therefore the mother buries him alive. Period, the end.
It gets worse. One stepmother kills her stepson, manages to convince her own daughter that the daughter killed the boy by accident, and then feeds the dead son to his own father.
Ah, what fun.
Unfortunately for the Grimm brothers, apparently the 1800s audience wasn’t keen to read these tales of cannibalism and debauchery. However, at the time children’s stories were selling quite well. So the Grimms reluctantly revised their book. With each new release they made their stories tamer and sweeter. The plots became more kid-friendly. Sales skyrocketed.
And thus the Faerie Tales as we now know them were created.
It wasn’t what the Grimm brothers were intending at all. But they liked getting money, and cute kiddy stuff was where it was at.
If the Grimm brothers were writing in modern times, they might have gone the other direction, adding vampires, werewolves, and hot sex into every scene : ).
In any case, my version of these folk tales is both sweetly gentle while at the same time brings back the feisty nature of the original heroines. The first heroines of these stories were not shrinking violets. They did not sprawl feebly on a cushioned couch waiting for their prince to come rescue them. Heck, many researchers argue that the original Grimm stories showcase women who were strong, determined, and willing to go for what they wanted. For some reason society felt the need to mash down that message in order to present it to children.
We don’t have to look too far in our own modern culture to see the echoes of this. It was just recently that a famous sports star told boys to be brave while girls should be “silent, polite, and gentle.”
We have come a long way – and yet we have a long way to go.
My stories are suitable for teenagers and up. They do not include explicit intimacy nor explicit violence. But, unlike those kiddified later Grimm versions which stripped away most traces of a woman who could stand on her own two feet, my tales strive to portray women who take charge of their own destinies.
A portion of all proceeds of this series benefit battered women’s shelters.