Aiden has been stealing trinkets for years so he can save enough to leave his step-family and Astor. When a burlery goes wrong, he meets Princess Delia who is currently trying to escape having to choose among several princes for the salvation of her kingdom. The two form an unlikely friendship and bend together to solve Astor's problem.

I'm a sucker for a good fairy tale retelling, and this retelling of Cinderella was extra fun. I appreciated the role reversal and the final joke about shoes...

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My opinion was not affected by the free copy.

This is going to be a really hard one to talk about without going into spoilers. When I saw this was a gender reverse of Cinderella, I was intrigued. You don't get to see many takes on it where the guy is in the role of Cinderella. This is more like taking some familiar elements about the story-- the stepfamily, the ball, the shoe that fits just right-- and build a different story around it. I really think that the Lunar Chronicles have spoiled me on fairy tale retellings. Don't get me wrong, this book still did some things to make this a unique take, I guess I was just hoping for something else.

My biggest problem in this book is similar to the problem in Mulan 2. Basically, these princesses are in an arranged marriage in order to assure peace in China. If they don't go through with it, there will be war, people will die, etc. That's pretty much what's at stake here in this book. If going through an arranged marriage was all that was at stake, then yeah, I could root for Delia fighting that and wanting to marry for love. But it's the fate of her entire planet! Millions of people's lives depend on her arranging a marriage. Sorry, but it's hard to root for love over an arranged marriage in this case. Plus I'm a little tired of arranged marriages being shown as bad things. There are still people who do it, and they turn out happy together.

Also, Delia was an extremely frustrating main character. Besides what I just mentioned before, she seems really dumb at times. Aidan is constantly evasive and refuses to answer even the most simple of questions, and she never seems suspicious of him or tries to pursue the line of questioning or dives deeper into investigating where he came from. Actually, her mother's pretty frustrating, too. She seems to already know there's a resistance going on and doesn't seem to do anything about it. She is so insistence on this marriage being the only thing that'll help fix their planet when there are clearly lots of problems going on that she needs to solve that don't have anything to do with a marriage. Also, the security on the palace sucks. I don't want to go into it because of spoilers, but good lord. I don't know how this monarch survived with the terrible job they do at background checks and body scans or whatever they do in this world.

Now on to the romance. I want to give it some leeway since it is based on a fairy tale where insta-love is just what happens, but even so, I would've liked a modern update in that regard. And again, it's hard to root for their love when the fate of an entire planet may depend on Delia's marriage. Plus I feel like all of the other princes were portrayed as so "wrong" for her when it would've been more interesting to have a few who could've been good matches. For example, there's this one prince who's constantly mocked because he is a fan of this TV show and has a model ship collection, and has a lot of wigs I guess. The plot basically eliminated any competition Aidan would have had, and I don't want to explain for spoiler reasons.

I need to talk about the ending a little bit. There were about two or three deus ex machina moments in the last fourth of the book that had me rolling my eyes and thinking "of course". Yes, I know that this is based on a fairy tale, and those last parts felt very fairy tale-ish in nature, but with all this other serious stuff going on, I guess I was hoping for a different sort of conclusion. Don't introduce all these problems if you're going to sweep them all up at the end like they weren't as big of a deal as they were built up to be.

I will say that the mythology of this world was very cool. I almost wish I'd been reading that book instead. I also really liked Shania's character. She was so fun and energetic and funny.

It's written well and when the climax was going on, I was definitely flipping pages to see what would happen next. To me, it just seems like this would've been pretty much the same book without any of the Cinderella elements.

I was really looking forward to reading this book! It did not disappoint and i thought the whole plot was very interesting. I will be purchasing this book more my library.