The Charmed Wife
'Does for fairy tales what Bridgerton has done for Regency England' (Mail on Sunday)
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
One of Oprah Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2021! 'Genre-bending and darkly comic, Grushin's fourth novel is a weird and wonderful triumph.'
And they lived happily ever after . . . didn't they?
Cinderella married the man of her dreams - the perfect ending she deserved after diligently following all the fairy-tale rules. Yet now, two children and thirteen-and-a-half years later, things have gone badly wrong.
One night, she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the Witch who, for a price, offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron, Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming.
Instead, she wants him dead.
Endlessly surprising and wildly inventive, The Charmed Wife is a sophisticated literary fairy tale for the twenty-first century that weaves together time and place, fantasy and reality, to conjure a world unlike any other. Nothing in it is quite what it seems, and the twists and turns of its magical, dark, swiftly shifting paths take us deep into the heart of romance, marriage and the very nature of storytelling.
'Dark and dreamy. Inside the plot, magic comes and goes. But inside the reader, it's all magic - all of us happily caught in Grushin's hypnotic spell.' - Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and The Jane Austen Book Club
'Fall under its charms, I dare you' - Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
