Book No. 84 of 2020
It’s romantic fiction/chick lit/otherwise low-stakes-happy-endings time around here, because election stress is very real and I cannot take my usual fare of tragic narratives and accounts of prejudice and injustice. (I very much have A Type.) I immediately picked up Eva Ibbotson’s A Countess Below Stairs/The Secret Countess because I was so delighted by A Company of Swans.
This is, objectively, a similarly delightful Cinderella retelling crafted with enjoyably lovable and hateable characters and whiffs of classic romance, helmed by a curious, intelligent, and kind young woman as the protagonist. However, one of the things I gleefully enjoyed about Swans (the smoldering tension and screamingly fabulous account of the way a “virtuous” girl becomes “ruined”) was not an element here. That’s not to say that this book is unenjoyable—it’s an immensely fun, romantic escape—it’s just no Swans!
That being said, some of Swans’ most delightful elements are intensified here. There is a wonderfully beloved small child, a beautiful but monstrous villain (who, uh, is a fervent eugenicist, white supremacist, ableist anti-Semite), a bit character who does The Most with the page time he is given, lush descriptions of gowns and jewels, mercifully short misunderstandings, a bath-as-meet-cute, and a narratively important dessert.
Similar Reads
The upstairs-downstairs setup, with strikingly similar household staff characters (some with identical or similar names) was so reminiscent of Downton Abbey that I’m now convinced that Julian Fellowes cribbed most of his story premise from this book.
The overall arc and characterizations of this book made it feel essentially like a grown-up version of A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
I’d pair this with other Cinderella retellings (it’s just such a richly embroidered archetype)—notably Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted.