A Fan's Playground

I've seen a lot of excited talk about this book as a fairy tale retelling featuring queer black women, which like, I am here for that! Unfortunately the way this particular book goes about its retelling doesn't work for me personally. It spends a lotttt of time wallowing in the awfulness of the way the patriarchy is manifested in this particular fantasy country, in a very heavy-handed way, which I just found unpleasant to read. The whole first half of the book is nothing but "look at all the TERRIBLE TRIALS our SPUNKY REBELLIOUS TEEN HEROINE must undergo!!!!" Which, valid, but not the kind of book I'm personally into. And I didn't really warm up to the rest of it, even though the second half was at least more interesting to me.

The thing is that this book is very didactic. And like, I have enjoyed my fair share of didactic literature aimed at young people, I grew up reading Edwardian children's books after all, but I find that there's kind of two flavours of didactic fiction available: either "this is what's good, isn't it wonderful?" or "this is what's bad, isn't it awful?” And both have their place, but if a work of fiction is going to be didactic, I'm personally better able to handle the first type than the second type, and Cinderella is Dead is thoroughly the second.

And it's too bad because I am interested in the book's theme, of how the cultural enshrining of certain kinds of stories ends up being a burden on the people who cannot live up to them. I think I might have enjoyed this book when I was a child, but it doesn't suit my current tastes.