Freya Hartas Books

We love a fairy tale with a twist and so eagerly welcomed the arrival of this new illustrated middle-grade series from Joseph Coelho and Freya Hartas, with this first instalment placing a deviously dark twist on the Cinderella story.

In this version, Cinderella (so called because she wears a locket containing her deceased mother’s ashes), lives with a ‘fake’ family made up of an evil stepmother and three beautiful and fake sisters. After losing both parents and her beloved horse Lumpkin, Cinderella feels very much alone in the world. The town receives a visit from a royal prince with unusually gothic tastes, who brings with him three days of parties and the promise of betrothal to a potential suitor from the town. When Cinderella suffers a slip on the stairs, life as she knows it comes to an end and she returns in a haze of gory glory as Zombierella before proceeding to win the prince’s heart for herself.

Coelho’s treatment of the story is as delightfully amusing as it is deliciously dark. After years of Disneyfication and a ‘softening up’ of this well-known tale for a generation who often find their stories served up with a little more happily-ever-after and a little less goriness, this version takes a direct step in the colder and creepier direction that you might expect from Roald Dahl’s fairy tales or the original Grimm stories. There’s plenty to shock – from the cold and detached reporting of Cinderella’s sudden death to the spooky insertion of pulled-out brains, loosened guts and severed limbs into a star-crossed rags-to-riches love story. There’s an enjoyable streak of dark humour and plenty of wit in both the author’s free verse and Freya Hartas’ stylishly expressive black and white illustrations. The story is framed by the voice of a librarian (fans of Coelho might expect nothing less) and leaves with the promise of more from the ‘Fairy Tales Gone Bad’ series – which I’m really looking forward to seeing unfold.