Book Review: The Charmed Wife by Olga Grushin

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Synopsis:

And they lived happily ever after . . . didn’t they?

‘Fall under its charms, I dare you’ – Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked

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

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My Review:

I didn’t really know what to expect when I started this novel. I was on a kick for a fairytale retelling and I thought the concept was interesting. However, sadly I didn’t enjoy this novel.

The story resumes with Cinderella, thirteen and half years after she married Prince Charming but it wasn’t all happily ever after. In fact, things have gone a bit stale, the pumpkin carriage has rotted and she goes hunting for a witch to solve her problems.

The concept of the story was great but inconsistent in its chronology and I found it difficult to follow at times. Interwoven in the narrative was a story that follows the mice which I felt pulled me out of the world. It would’ve served better separate from the main story, maybe even at the end as a bonus to allow the reader to decide if they are interested in it.

The characters were never really fleshed out and remained two-dimensional. I honestly couldn’t tell you much about them because they didn’t leave much of an impression on me.

I did enjoy the concept, and the twist put an interesting spin on the retelling. However, the execution of the story let it down, and overall, I didn’t enjoy the story.

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