The Jilted Bride: A Footnote to Cinderella's Happiness (Fairetellings) (Volume 1)

By Kristen Reed

Description:

Sometimes one woman’s happily ever after is another woman’s misery. When the charming Prince Caspar abandons his bride Demetria at the altar to sweep Cinderella off her feet, the duke’s daughter is left humiliated and heartbroken. Desperate to lift their daughter’s spirits, Demetria’s parents introduce her to a new suitor from a foreign land. Jaded by being jilted, she questions the very thing she has built her life around and searches for new meaning and healing with two unlikely companions. The Jilted Bride takes readers on a heartfelt journey as it explores the aftermath of the Cinderella’s happy ending in a world where there are no fairy godmothers to magically heal a devastated young woman’s broken heart.

Book Takeaway:

Joy and our identities are not found in who we marry or who rejects us. They're found in Christ. He can bring us peace and healing even from our most unexpected hurts.

Why the author wrote this book:

I've always loved fairy tales, and I think our culture is equally fascinated by stories of true love's kiss, glass slippers, and strange creatures. One common thread throughout many of these famous stories is magic. All you have to do is look at the box office over the past several years. With movies like Disney's Maleficent and the live action Cinderella and shows such as Once Upon A Time, we get to watch as fairy godmothers, evil queens, and more wield amazing power that can either create or solve issues for the protagonists, but what would happen if there wasn't any magic? What if the characters in the stories we all grew up with were bound by the same rules and restrictions that we deal with? What if their happy endings created more problems than they solved?
This is why inspiration struck after seeing the classic movie The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella on television several times earlier this year. At the end of the movie, Cinderella (Gemma Craven) interrupts Prince Edward's (Richard Chamberlain's) wedding to another woman and they wind up married instead. Thankfully, the fairy godmother ensures that Edward's fiancee and his cousin fall in love, so everyone lives happily ever after. However, I started to wonder what would have happened without the fairy godmother's supernatural intervention.
That's where The Jilted Bride came from.