This new series brings readers the origin stories of some of Disney’s most notorious villains. Okay, they already have several books focusing on this topic but Benway’s book is more focused on a canonical reasoning for how the Tremine sisters became the ugly steps they are. There’s no really lame cause (hello Dalmations pushing Cruella’s mom off a cliff. What were they thinking?) but an actual realistic one centered around the themes of abuse, bringing readers to sympathesize and understand them as their hearts turn wicked.
Intriguingly, the story starts from the POV of Father Tremine, the night he decides to abscond with the valuables and leave his family for even though he loves them, he can’t take the responsibilities anymore. As the narrator says loving and missing them doesn’t make up for his abandonment and his escape into the night shapes the family for years to come. However, he is not the cowering yet loving father figure the girls imagine him as because Benway slips in the fact that he admits to resenting his children’s easy happiness (because they’re children!) and avoiding harder parental responsibilities. He is not cruel but he’s also okay with standing by when his wife is more cruel with her pinches and verbal taunts.
Which seems to be a running theme as he feels sympathetic to his wife’s plight with her own verbally abusive mother and mentions a hard past that even she won’t tell him, and he won’t pry. It’s clear that this family is not happy nor healthy and it’s about to get worse.
Flashforward ten years later after the death of Ella’s father and her life of servitude for the Tremines. But it’s not her story. Rather she tiptoes around the house, gaining bruises and screams from the Lady Tremine while Drizella and Anastasia also try to avoid her wrath.
The best part of the book is how Benway depicts the clustraphobia and harshness of the house-hold, all the girls always thining of their next moves for fear of bringing Lady Tremine’s ire towards them. While Ella does bear the brunt of it being treated a servant and all, Drizella and Anastasia weren’t spared either. They had dealt with it all their lives with Lady Tremine running between icy cold and white-hot rages, slyly trying to pit them against one another (Anastasia is pretty but an idiot, while Drizella is ugly and is the last hope to save the family’s ruin by marrying the prince), calling them disappointments, failures, always holding up the fact that she feeds them and clothes them so they owe her (even though it’s her job as a mother!).
Her love is conditional so they better work hard at being proper ladies because she’s their only connection, no one else will love them as stupid and lazy and ungrateful as they are.
There’s also a harrowing amount of PTSD for Anastasia that involves a tower and continues to haunt her throughout the book which Benway suspensfully waits to reveal at the end.
So Lady Tremine is just a lovely woman. But her attitude extends to everyone. The villagers are simple-minded idiots and drunkards in her view so she keeps the girls at home for the most part, adding to their isolation. They’re only granted a reprive at the dreaded flute lessons for Anastasia and voice lessons for Drizella. They’re both failures and they know it, but they must because the Prince’s debut ball is coming up and they know it’ll be worse for them if they fail.
However, one fateful day after months of lessons the girls both get a jolt to their same-old lives. Anastasia meets a suitor and Drizella meets a mentor befitting Anastasia’s dreamy, romantic nature and Drizella’s need for a mother and love of science.
Anastasia’s romance with Dominic, the palace stableboy is very sweet to read. Almost Bridgerton-lite as they meet when he nearly runs her over and thereafter have illuminatingly honest conversations in a lilac field, dreaming of Paris and being together in a world of their own. Dominic opens a world to Anastasia that not everyone sees her as dumb and unrealistic, that her dreams aren’t foolish and maybe love isn’t conditional and she deserves it.
Drizella, on the other hand finds a comforting arm in Madam Lambert, a rare lady scientist for the day whose teachings of astronomy, biology and more light up the universe. It expands her mind and makes her feel that she can be so much more than a bad singer, her worth is more than marrying a prince. What’s more important Madam Lambert allows space for Drizella’s emotions and letting down the burden of being the eldest though she’s initially mortified by all of this personal turmoil because she finds feelings useless.
And it makes the ending hurt so much more. In fact, I actually had forgotten that this was a villain origin story and was so swept up with their newfound happiness and plans that I actually was rooting for their happily ever after even as the narrator intones that things will take an unfortunate turn. I was that convinced which just illustrates Benway’s skill in making me love these characters and wanting them to break away from the fear that they’ll become exactly like their mother.
Benway said she rewatched the movie a lot as she wrote this book and it shows, giving both girls distinctive personalities. Anastasia is the nicer one, more likely to want love and be loved in return while Drizella is more prone to Lady Tremine’s mannerisms and cynical view of the world, making her that much more intimidating. The very fact is pointed out several times and contributes to her fear that she’ll end up like her. Nonetheless, their sisterly bond is paramount even as they end up at odds at points when their personalities clash.
The scene at the Prince’s ball is a big spoiler so I’ll keep it vague, but it was a real tearjerking moment for Anastasia and Drizella as they’re confronted with humiliation and intense self-doubt knowing they’re going to perform and fail. All their trying is for nothing, they’ll always be considered ugly and stupid, and Ella just so easily outshines them all the time.
As for where Ella is during all this. She’s a minor role but it’s important and illustrates the “bite others to survive” mentality of the house. While Anastasia and Drizella feel sympathy for her at times, they are unwilling to risk Lady Tremine’s anger being directed at them. Other times, they see Lady Tremine’s abuse directed toward Ella as Ella’s fault for being stupid or not doing as she’s told. It’s complicated but they all have scars from this but Benway makes it clear that even though they all have their reasons, even Lady Tremine, it doesn’t excuse their actions in the end. Ugliness is in the inside after all.
Which reminds me, there is another layer that even as Drizella/Anastasia divulge some of their mother’s more heinous habits and insults to Dominic/Madam Lambert and I think it’s obvious that the household is not a good place and abusive, neither pries more about the cruelty of Lady Tremine or says that’s not how love should be. And the girls still can’t admit the full extent of it to themselves or out loud because they think its normal and sometimes, deserved.
There’s also several funny moments like the running joke of the girls thinking they’re seeing the mice dressed in little outfits. It’s ridiculous and they think they’re imagining things but if it is true, it has to be Ella’s doing. Plus Drizella has a very biting, dry humor that’s entertaining to read. We also get to see how Lucifer joins the household, possibly the only being that Lady Tremine actually likes.
At times the writing feels like it’s more telling than showing like in this paragraph, “This is the moment where Anastasia should apologize, throw her arms around her sister and beg her forgiveness, offer her the kind of comfort that Dominic so easily extended to her. But Anastasia has spent her entire life in a cruel household, under cruel guidance, kept under literal lock and key with very little softness to ease away the harshest edges, and there are some lessons that are vvery difficult to unlearn,” (Benway 228).
But I suppose it is needed as the omnipresent narrator can tell the reader what Drizella/Anastasia are unable to self-reflect. It almost feels like the book is for early high schoolers as it has a few curse words like “hell” and “damnation” and implications if you read between the lines but doesn’t get too dark (well minus the constant abuse but you get the idea).
Still I highly recommend this new insight to the Tremine sisters and their shaping to the cruel ugly stepsisters we know today, and the depiction of the vicious cycle and atmosphere of abuse that runs in families.
Also, just a side note that this is the third very engaging take-off of Cinderella I’ve read. The other two being So This is Love by Elizabeth Lim and If the Shoes Fits by Julie Murphy. They each added depth or different ways to look at the characters and it’s making me want to rewatch the movie. Maybe it isn’t as boring as I used to think.
Rachel Reads & Reviews 
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