Lady Tremaine, by Rachel Hochhauser
Spoiler warning: this review discusses the ending in full, including how the book resolves Ethel’s romantic arc and where her daughters end up.
The first thing I’d tell anyone picking this up: don’t go in expecting a Cinderella retelling, whatever the jacket copy says. Technically, sure, Elin is in here and so is the ball and the shoe and the prince. But the marketing is selling the wrong book. This is Ethel’s story, full stop, and framing it as “Cinderella but from the stepmother’s side” undersells what Hochhauser is actually doing, which is something much more interesting than a villain-origin gimmick.
What that something is, mostly, is an argument that marriage is unnecessary — a position the book never states outright but builds, brick by brick, until it’s unavoidable. It’s a strange thing to find so bracing in 2026, in a culture that already claims to have made peace with this idea. But most stories, even the feminist-coded ones, still end with the wedding as the reward. Hochhauser doesn’t. Twice-widowed, twice put through the machinery of marriage as economic survival, Ethel comes out the other side knowing exactly what it costs and exactly what it doesn’t buy you. That’s a harder-won, more interesting conclusion than “marriage bad.” It’s “marriage is a tool, and I’m done needing it.”
Ethel herself is the reason the book works. She’s self-sufficient in a way that never reads as a girlboss retrofit onto a period setting — she knows precisely how much of herself she has to perform for the sake of her daughters’ futures, and she does it without ever losing the thread of who she actually is underneath it. That gap between the woman managing society’s expectations and the woman making the decisions is where all the good material lives. It’s also why the scheming never feels like villainy for its own sake. Every manipulation, every calculated cruelty toward Elin, is legible as a mother doing the math on what her children need to survive a world that gives women almost no other options. You don’t have to agree with her choices to understand them, and the book earns that understanding instead of asking for it.
The relationship with Elin is the emotional spine, and it’s the best-built thing in the novel. Elin spends most of the book rejecting Ethel as a stepmother, on solid grounds, and Hochhauser doesn’t rush her out of that anger. So when the moment finally comes where Elin needs comfort and Ethel is the only one who can give it to her, it lands. Not because they’ve reconciled in some tidy way, but because the book has shown you, patiently, that Ethel’s love was never in question — only its expression was.
That’s what makes the ending work. Ethel does end up with a man in the final stretch, and it would have been easy for Hochhauser to close the loop with a third marriage, tying a bow on a “wicked stepmother learns to love again” arc. She doesn’t. Ethel gets the relationship without the ring. Having been married off twice for reasons that had nothing to do with her own happiness, she’s the one character in the book who fully understands that her worth was never contingent on a husband — her independence is the thing she actually fought for, and she’s not giving it up now that she can finally choose. It’s a quietly radical choice for a book operating inside fairy-tale furniture.
The epilogue is where that theme completes itself. For the whole novel, Ethel drills her daughters on the pursuit of marriage as the only available currency — it’s the water she’s swimming in, and she teaches them to swim in it too. But the epilogue shows her actually reckoning with what her daughters want, and it isn’t marriage. It’s her. They want to be like their mother: self-possessed, unmarried, running their own lives. Watching Ethel accept that — after a whole book of pushing them toward the opposite — is the most quietly moving turn in the novel.
I also want to give Hochhauser credit for something that sounds small but isn’t: she lets economic realism back into a story that fairy tales usually strip it out of. Why would a prince marry a pauper? The original Cinderella never asks. This version does, and once you start asking it, the entire scheming, striving, marrying-up machinery of the plot makes total sense. The villainy isn’t cartoonish — it’s what desperation under real constraints actually looks like.
Rating: 3.5/5. Read it for Ethel, not for Cinderella — the book is smarter and stranger than its own marketing lets on, even if that marketing does it a disservice from the jump.
