Reviewed by Marta Morrison for TeensReadToo.com

"What occurs in the world of faerie will manifest in the world of man."

This thought was the main theme of GODMOTHER.

This was a dark retelling of the story of Cinderella. When I saw the cover, I thought,"a fun, light read." I was very wrong. This is a story about Lil, an old woman broken in spirit who lives a very meager life in New York. She works in a bookstore, and her life consists of working, eating, and sleeping.

But Lil has a secret. If you saw her back you would see wings. She is actually the fairy who was sent to be Cinderella's godmother, but she made a terrible mistake that night. Lil fell in love with the prince and couldn't help the broken spirit of Cinderella.

Since that night, Lil has been permanently in the world of man, thrown out of the world of faerie, until she can redeem herself and fix what she did to Cinderella.

This book is not for the immature reader. It has a very dark, ambiguous ending. The characters all live lives of despair.

However, this would be a good book to read in a book club or with a group of friends. It needs to be talked about. The writing was extraordinary and the author needs to be commended.

So read GODMOTHER if you would like a more realistic version of the beloved fairy tale. ( )

Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story dances between two times: long ago, when the fairy godmother was charged with getting Cinderella to the ball, and modern day. Our modern day heroine is Lil, short for Lillian, who is a fairy in the body of an old woman, albeit one with giant, white, feathery wings she must conceal from humans. She works in a rare booked store in Manhattan.

Lil is a sad but lovable narrator. I found myself enjoying the modern scenes set in Manhattan much more than the slowly evolving story of Cinderella. Each chapter begins with the long ago tale, but it became increasingly clear to me the outcome of Cinderella and the ball (it's not the fairy tale we grew up hearing) far earlier in the book than it's actually revealed. These breaks into the past disrupted the flow of the story. Still, Lil is a delight.

I confess I don't read many books dealing with fairies, so I can't speak to the originality of the banished fairy. Before this book, I wasn't familiar with visual depictions of fairies or the plethora of fairy lore.

Overall, I enjoyed the book enough to read it in two days, but I didn't love it. I fully admit I am not a fan of fairy tales, and I imagine this predilection colors my view of this book. I do want to read Carolyn Turgeon's other novel, Rain Village, about a Midwestern girl who becomes a trapeze artist. ( )

It's a familiar story: Cinderella needs to go to the ball where she will meet the prince, fall in love with him and live happily ever after. To get there, she needs the help of her fairy godmother, Lil. Except that Lil has fallen in love with the prince herself, and things begin to go horribly wrong, disastrously wrong.

For falling in love with a human and provoking him to fall in love with her -- a human intended for another -- Lil is banished from the world of Fairy to the human world. When we meet her she is very like the elderly Disneyesque fairy godmother of our youth, but we learn that this is part of her punishment, that her true form is a tiny, perfect, winged creature who should look more like a point of light to us than someone's grandmother. That on the rare occasion when, for some reason, she took human form, she was perfect; superbly beautiful and supernaturally attractive. There's a desperation to Lil's plight, one most of us will feel if we live long enough.

For all that this is ostensibly a fairytale, it's very human and at times quite sad. The humans who inhabit Lil's world are all a little lost, a little damaged. She wants them to be happy. More than that, she believes that if she can help two of them to find the kind of happily-ever-after she should have provided for Cinderella, then perhaps her exile can come to an end, and she can rejoin her fairy tribe again, and be as she was. That she succeeds on any level is something of a triumph.

The simple, familiar story becomes complicated and messy, the characters reveal their layers, their hopes and their hurts, and it all seems so effortless on Turgeon's part, as if she's simply telling a story that was told to her. Isn't that the way of all the best fairytales, after all? Fairytales, fables, they all reveal something about the human condition. What drives us, what hurts us, how we come through. Everyone here is flawed, but seen through Lil's eyes, they show what they might be. It's a transcendent way of viewing the world, one of which which humans rarely seem capable. Being able to experience this way of seeing via Lil's narrative does make it seem almost like supernatural vision. It's compelling and involving in the way any good story should be, but which most fail to deliver.

As for the ending, I can't say too much about it for fear of spoiling the story, but I will admit that though I did suspect some of what was revealed, I never suspected the whole truth of it. And that was perhaps the most satisfying thing of all about this novel. ( )

This was an interesting take on the Cinderella tale. It is the story of the fairy godmother, Lil, who managed to screw up and didn't get Cinderella to the ball and fell in love with the handsome prince herself. For her sins, she is banished to the human world. Then, much later she is given a chance to redeem herself by helping a modern Cinderella go to the ball with her handsome prince.

It's a good story that takes the premise of the Cinderella tale into new waters. It also introduces the use of the unreliable narrator to the story; even at the end of the book, I wasn't sure if Lil was really a fairy godmother or if she was just an ordinary old lady who was suffering from some form of dementia.

Whether she was a fairy or not, she tells a good tale. ( )

Wow. This book is amazing. First off, the writing itself is superb. The descriptions of the bookstore and of the city itself made me feel as though I was there. I read this book aloud to my daughter and I savored every word as it rolled off my tongue. The story itself is engaging with a twist that I never saw coming, and I pride myself on spotting the twists long before they ever show up. At the end, I was left happy, but in shock. Highly recommended. ( )