All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella by Danielle Teller

read by Jane Copland

In the spirit of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, All the Ever Afters takes a familiar tale and turns it on its head by telling from the point of view of the villain. In this case the villain-turned-protagonist is Agnes, Cinderella’s purportedly evil stepmother. And oh boy, do we get a different picture of what kind of person Cinderella really is.

To begin with, this is very much Agnes’ tale, not Cinderella’s (she’s actually called Ella), though of course that fabled beauty plays a tremendous part in Agnes’s life—and not just by spreading those nasty rumors about the woman who eventually becomes her stepmother. Ella is an ethereally lovely child with an extremely tenuous grip on reality; she’s also the spoiled only daughter of a drunken lord, in whose household Agnes becomes a laundress when her family can no longer afford to keep her.

Agnes works in the drunken lord’s household for a number of years, under the supervision of a lazy, despotic sadist of a head laundress. She has a fair amount of contact with the lord of the manor, first because as the lowest-ranking servant in the house she can be made to deal with him when his drunkenness has made him unusually difficult, and then because she proves herself equal to the task of jollying him along. He develops a fondness for her; he is, nonetheless, a frightening individual to be around when he is in his cups, which he usually is.

Eventually her fortunes improve and she becomes a better sort of servant in a better sort of household. Much later, after numerous ups and downs as her hopes for a better life are repeatedly dashed because of a society and legal system that are stacked against the poor, Agnes returns to work for Ella’s father—as a senior servant. Now that she has more say in how things are run, her understandable bitterness comes out in petty ways. But overall she runs the household well, including handling its still-drunken lout of a lord and his spoiled, mentally unstable daughter, Ella.

The “wicked stepmother” rumors start here, as Agnes tries to find ways to get Ella to learn the responsibilities of running a household and to have some appreciation for the hard work that all of the servants do for her. And Agnes does, by something of a miracle and much to everyone’s disapproval, end up marrying Ella’s father. And no, that’s not the end of the story—but I’ve already given away a lot.

Basically, if you like a good, solid retelling of a fairy tale with richly detailed world-building, especially ones from non-traditional points of view, you’ll like this one a lot. It’s a really good example of the genre.