the story behind the story: PRETTY DEADLY

I love fairytales. I always have.

I think every little girl grows up on Disney movies and Hans Christian Andersen books (fun fact, my great grandparents came from the town where he lived!). We dreamed of pretty dresses and royalty. But even as a child, I saw how much darker the original versions were than the animated movies. And, though I wouldn’t have known how to articulate why, I liked them better that way.

One of the Disney movies that especially troubled me was Cinderella. I loved the birds and mice and magic, and I found her time at the ball beautiful, but I was bothered by how easily everything came to her after that. All she had to do was look pretty and then she won? Even worse–her victory had very little to do with her! She deserved it, obviously (the birds and mice couldn’t be wrong) but I wanted to see her triumph, not stumble into marriage.

This annoyance got worse as I grew up. I encountered retelling after retelling, so many movies called something like A Cinderella Story where the whole point was the heroine being swept off her feet by a prince who saved her. I wanted a heroine who would save herself!

So I dreamed up Cinna. And I made this retelling very, very dark.

Cinna isn’t an easy person to like, but that’s not the point. She is beautiful, like every other Cinderella–I figured I’d give her that. But unlike so many fairytale heroines, she’s not a pretty-but-doesn’t-know-it girl-next-door. Cinna very much knows it, and knows how to exploit it.

PRETTY DEADLY is a retelling of Cinderella in which the main character wrenches the agency out of the hands of anyone else, forcing her way into victory. She’ll lie, cheat, and steal (and do much worse) to get what she wants, which isn’t the prince–it’s the throne. She has no compunctions about anyone else’s idea of decency, morality, or fairness; all she cares about is seeing how far she can go. And it turns out this’ll get her pretty far.

I kept the bones of the story: young woman abused by her family goes to a ball, gets the prince to fall in love with her, and lives happily ever after. There are some nice shoes involved.

But I gave Cinna the kind of personality I’d never seen in a fairytale and brought back the brutality of the original versions (and then some). I made sure love wasn’t the point of the story, because as great as love is, I’m not the sort of author who can make it carry a book (and not the kind of person who wants it to). And I crafted a twisty heist story that I hope you’ll love.

PRETTY DEADLY will be released on October 26, 2021 from Darkstroke Books. It’ll be available for preorder on Amazon soon.