Slipper

by Hester Velmans

Overview

Meet the woman who will inspire the author of the world's most famous story:

Lucinda, a penniless English orphan, is abused and exploited as a cinder-sweep by her aristocratic relatives. On receiving her sole inheritance--a pair of glass-beaded slippers--she runs away to France in pursuit of an officer on whom she has a big crush. She joins the baggage train of Louis XIV's army, survives a horrific massacre, and eventually finds her way to Paris. There she befriends the man who will some day write the world's best loved fairy tale, Charles Perrault.

There is much more: a witch hunt, the sorry truth about daydreams, and some truly astonishing revelations, such as the historical facts behind the story of the Emperor's new clothes, and a perfectly reasonable explanation for the compulsion some young women have to kiss frogs.

This is not the fairy tale you remember.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780999475607
Publisher:	Van Horton Books
Publication date:	04/17/2018
Pages:	378
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.84(d)

Table of Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PERRAULT’S WORLD

PART ONE

1 Once upon a bed

2 A silver spoon

3 The art of love

4 The ugly Steppys sister

5 The cuckoo in the nest

6 Who’s the fairest

7 The kiss

8 After the ball

9 Potions

10 The wolf

11 Ruin

12 Quicksilver

13 Cindersweep

14 The sleuths

15 William

16 The beaded slippers

17 A proposition

18 A witch

19 The cure and the curse

20 Pluck

21 A tidy catch

22 Wish come true

23 Fond, foolish, wanton

24 Donkey’s skin

25 Rescue me

26 Life’s great secret

27 The (almost) truth

28 Civil liberties

29 The runaways

30 London

31 The quality of mercy

PART TWO

32 The king’s new clothes

33 Love is

34 The march

35 Amends

36 Such tiny feet

37 Of frogs and Englishmen

38 The fen-jade’s feather

39 Dragon’s claw

40 The assault

41 Pot of gold

42 The pumpkin

43 A miscarriage of fate

44 Bodegraven and Zwammerdam

45 The hero

46 Lost

PART THREE

47 A virgin

48 The customer

49 Beauty Asleep

50 Awakening

51 Puss in boots

52 Penelope

53 A carriage

54 Belle of the ball

55 The Labyrinth

56 Patience

57 The face that launched a thousand ships

58 The last laugh

59 The slipper

BIOGRAPHY AND MYTHOLOGY

Editorial Reviews

"Slipper is the most engaging novel I have read in a long time. Part romantic love story, part fairy tale, part feminist commentary, this is a wonderful, old fashioned novel to be savored. It is as if a graduate student had stumbled upon a handwritten, 19th century manuscript in the British Library, read it, and declared, 'There was a fourth Bronte sister -- and she was the most talented of the brood!'" — Daniel Klein, author of Plato and Platypus Walk into a Bar and Travels with Epicurus

"An unexpectedly honest modern novel clothed in the traditional tropes of historical romance. Despite thematically re-imagining the origins of several popular fairy tales, as a bildungsroman the story is refreshingly authentic in the growth of the heroine from an unfettered idealist to a nearly-perfected realist. ...The charm of the protagonist is more than potent enough to draw the reader along through a story that both pointedly charges us with taking command of our own fate, and tasks us with deciding for ourselves what the moral of our own story should be." -- Thomas A. Peters, Readers' Favorite

"Although this novel mainly pays specific homage to Cinderella, Velmans laces the book with references to the other tales. The author builds this network with remarkable care, and although the resulting novel is a complex web of influences, it’s never a confounding one. Furthermore, she writes in a delicate, ornate prose style that has a transporting effect, bringing readers back to Perrault’s time and nestling them in a thoroughly alluring narrative. A satisfying blend of history and myth that breathes new life into Cinderella." — Kirkus

"A unique take on the classic fairy tale Cinderella, SLIPPER blends historical fact with historical fiction to create a starkly realistic yet hopeful tale of overcoming hardship....It feels realistic in its skillful blend of history and fiction, adding historical figures to the ensemble as though the fictional characters alongside them existed too." — IndieReader

From the Publisher

2018-04-16
A loving re-creation of a well-known fairy tale.The story, set in the mid-1600s, begins in earnest when Olivia, the fifth Hempstead daughter, catches the eye of a local baron, who subsequently "ha[s] her in the bushes." A few months later, when it becomes obvious that Olivia is pregnant, Lord and Lady Hempstead send her away from their grand home to hide their shame. But after the young woman dies during childbirth, her loving nursemaid, Bessie, takes the baby—named Lucinda—back to her grandparents and convinces them to let them both live in a high, secluded wing of the manor. Unfortunately, the return to the family home is a mixed blessing for young Lucinda, who's later put to hard labor by her relatives and forced to deal with condescension and abuse from the other children. Throughout, it's Bessie—a veritable fairy godmother—who protects and guides the young child, whom one of her half siblings derisively labels "Lucy-cinder." If this is all starting to sound familiar, it should, because Velmans' (Jessaloup's Song, 2011, etc.) ingenious novel is, at its core, an origin story for Cinderella. The author says in a note that she sees her project as a kind of tardy vindication of Charles Perrault, the 17th-century French author who's often credited as the father of the fairy tale. (Perrault himself looms large as a character in the latter parts of the book.) Many years before the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen put pen to paper, Perrault gave the world Sleeping Beauty, Mother Goose, Little Red Riding Hood, and a host of other iconic characters. So although this novel mainly pays specific homage to "Cinderella," Velmans laces the book with references to those other tales. The author builds this network with remarkable care, and although the resulting novel is a complex web of influences, it's never a confounding one. Furthermore, she writes in a delicate, ornate prose style that has a transporting effect, bringing readers back to Perrault's time and nestling them in a thoroughly alluring narrative. A satisfying blend of history and myth that breathes new life into "Cinderella."

Kirkus Reviews