Charlotte Kersten's Reviews > Stepsister

** spoiler alert ** “Go now, girl. Remake the world."

So What’s It About? (from Goodreads)

Isabelle should be blissfully happy – she’s about to win the handsome prince. Except Isabelle isn’t the beautiful girl who lost the glass slipper and captured the prince’s heart. She’s the ugly stepsister who’s cut off her toes to fit into Cinderella’s shoe … which is now filling with blood.

When the prince discovers Isabelle’s deception, she is turned away in shame. It’s no more than she deserves: she is a plain girl in a world that values beauty; a feisty girl in a world that wants her to be pliant.

Isabelle has tried to fit in. To live up to her mother’s expectations. To be like her stepsister. To be sweet. To be pretty. One by one, she has cut away pieces of herself in order to survive a world that doesn’t appreciate a girl like her. And that has made her mean, jealous, and hollow.

Until she gets a chance to alter her destiny and prove what ugly stepsisters have always known: it takes more than heartache to break a girl.

What I Thought

As you might remember, I really, really, REALLY liked Damsel – its ugliness and pain, its incandescent fury, its unflinching ability to rip right to the heart of the hideousness of the patriarchy and its abuse of women. I started Stepsister hoping it would scratch that same itch for me – after all, they’re both recent feminist YA fantasies that use classic fairy tale tropes to examine sexism’s impact on young women! Also, the covers look really similar! Honestly, I think my lukewarm reception to Stepsister is partially attributable to the fact that I was comparing it to Damsel the whole time I was reading it.

This is by no means a bad book, but it just…didn’t quite go far enough for me, if that makes sense? The book’s underlying messages are good and important ones, and ones that deserve to be shouted from the rooftops: as women, the things that make us beautiful are our skills, our confidence, the goodness that we offer the world! Chasing after superficial beauty is a futile, never-ending goal designed to keep women trapped in insecurity so they don’t focus on the things that really matter! Women become complicit in perpetuating these standards upon one another, reinforcing the cycles of hatred, insecurity and misery, forcing each other to conform and punishing those who don’t!

I think part of my problem is that the book gets bogged down in Isabelle’s unconvincing redemption arc. There are a few reasons that her transformation never really worked for me. For one thing, I never truly felt like she was all that evil in the first place. We see terrible cruelty in the way that she abuses her stepsister, but strangely these instances are only mentioned a couple of times, and they are drastically different from the way that she behaves throughout the rest of the story, including the beginning when she is allegedly still unredeemed. I wish that Donnelly had gone further in villainizing her in the beginning, so there was more room for growth in the later parts of the story.

There’s another problem with her redemption arc, and this is one that I’m probably only aware of because I recently watched The Good Place: how can Isabelle be redeemed when her principal motivation for finding her heart again is a corrupt one (the fairy promises her that if she finds her heart she will become beautiful)? Of course, what this really means is that a girl who is true to her heart is beautiful no matter what she looks like on the outside, but Isabelle doesn’t realize this until very late in the story! For most of the book she only does good things because she thinks it will literally transform her into a physically beautiful woman. It all falls a bit flat when you take this into consideration.

I also struggled with how the stepmother and other stepsister are handled. Tavi is never really nasty, just deeply self-absorbed, and although she doesn’t undergo the same process of growth as Isabelle she nevertheless begs Ella for forgiveness at the end of the story. Because we never really got to see her internal process, begging Ella for forgiveness sort of felt like it came out of nowhere. I also feel like the stepmother’s role in the story could have been handled very differently. As it is, there are hints of her cruelty and abuse but she spends most of the story in the midst of a psychic break, wandering around and mumbling vaguely before unexpectedly finding some kind of redemption at the end of the story as well:

“Maman stood next to her, beaming at this duke and that countess. She had apologized to Ella, they had reconciled and she now spent her days in the palace gardens talking to royal cabbage heads.”

How did that conversation go? “Sorry I enslaved and abused you for years, now that you’re rich will you please be nice to me?” I hope you can see why I struggle with these kinds of resolutions to the story – it all feels a bit pat, a bit simplistic. Maybe that’s just sticking true to the fairy-tale nature of the story, but it ultimately left me wanting more.