The Charmed Wife

October 26, 2020
Grushin (The Dream Life of Sukhanov) delivers a dizzying retelling of “Cinderella,” one in which nothing is as it seems and fairy tale marriages do not end happily ever after. Jane, 13 years into her marriage with Roland, who initially seemed like “absolutely everything a sad young girl with clouds and dreams for feelings could have wished for,” realizes she never loved him. The marriage was merely an escape from her widowed mother—whose love was “disapproving, damaging, demanding” and who told Jane as a child that she was only good at mopping dirty bathroom floors—and her two older sisters whom she believed were her mother’s favorites. Roland, a cruel philanderer, is no fairy tale prince. For revenge, she meets with a witch and sets in motion a curse to kill him, but then settles for a divorce. Jane’s freedom comes at a cost: she exchanges her opulent Fifth Avenue home for a small, roach-infested apartment, and takes a job as a house cleaner for a group of slovenly young women. This clever, sometimes humorous novel drags in places and occasionally suffers from its labyrinthine plot, which includes talking mice who have their own adventures, and Jane’s destabilizing second-guessing of the fantastical elements. For now, the Disney version wins the day. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc.

November 1, 2020
Grushin follows Forty Rooms (2016) with a reconceived and extended fairy tale that will delight domestic-fiction readers with its depiction of Cinderella as an overweight and lackluster 35-year-old wife to an ignoble prince, and mother of two children. Grushin achieves a fairy-talk style and brings in characters from the works of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. The plot thickens when Grushin unveils a despondent Cinderella who, after trying other solutions, is now intent on exacting revenge on her husband. She finds a witch in a cave who is willing to grant her wish: she wants her prince dead. As the potion brews in the cauldron, flashbacks reveal how this happily-ever-after marriage ceased to be so. The mystery of how a woman who has everything would resort to drastic measures is at the core of the book and pivots the fairy tale back to its moral roots. An element of suspense is worked into a tapestry of new and modern backstories, while nostalgic story lines add a bit of fun; there is even a side story about Cinderella's mice that deserves its own separate book. Surprising revelations and some snark provide the finishing touch in this richly imagined, genre-bending retelling of, at its heart, a tale-as-old-as-time.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from December 1, 2020

"I want him dead because I hate the woman I am when I am with him," proclaims the protagonist of this stunning new work from Grushin (Forty Rooms). Some women have thought that, but can this be true of Cinderella, the presumed embodiment of happily ever after? After 13 and a half increasingly distant years from Prince Charming, Cinderella leaves the palace one dark night to visit a witch who brews evil potions. But what starts as an acutely observed feminist understanding of her travails morphs brilliantly into a rich, multidimensional treatment of human relationships, particularly marriage. The prince can be faulted, but obtuse Cinderella barely knows herself or the truth behind her famed story. Even the mice that lovingly tend to her marvel at her failure to realize that "her one-note, romance-obsessed, clich�-ridden story might not be immensely more important or endlessly more fascinating than [their own] multigenerational, multi-dimensional, magical, militant, philosophical, and culturally diverse saga," and Cinderella must face the cruel truth that she's lost her spark. Not so Grushin. VERDICT An absorbing study of marriage, divorce, self, and responsibility, threaded with numerous retold fairytales and rendered in prescient, gorgeous language. Highly recommended.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2020
The author of Forty Rooms (2016) takes on Cinderella. "Cinderella" is one of the most-often-told tales in the world. In this iteration of the familiar story, the heroine has been married to her prince long enough to want to murder him. Grushin is not the first to wonder what comes after happily-ever-after, of course, and she's aware of this. She uses the last stanza of Anne Sexton's "Cinderella" as an epigram. This may not have been a wise choice, as Sexton's 10 lines are ultimately more satisfying than Grushin's 288 pages. This novel occupies an uncomfortable place between realism, postmodernism, and folklore. Part of the appeal of Cinderella--part of the appeal of all folkloric heroines--is that she's a blank screen onto which we can project our own selves and our own desires. This sort of protagonist works for long enough to sustain a fairy tale, but a novel typically requires a protagonist who emerges as a real person. Grushin's Cinderella has enough of an inner life to make her specific--rather than universal--but not enough to emerge as a fully developed character. There's an analogous issue of narrative voice. Fairy tales don't feel like pure exposition because they are set in an eternal past and because they are short. Grushin isn't the first author to try to refresh this style by adding a surfeit of adjectives and metaphors, but neither is she more successful than her predecessors. Maybe the most noteworthy thing about this novel is that its author has already written a much better one that asks the questions it seems to want to pose. Forty Rooms was, among other things, an extended meditation on what autonomy, identity, and purpose mean for women. It's also worth noting that when working with--against?--the formal constraints of a story set in Soviet Russia and suburban America, Grushin conjures more magic than she does in the fantasy world of this novel. It's not hard to understand the temptation to rework this oft-told tale, but the result of this exercise is disappointing.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.