Etheldreda Tremaine Bramley is a brewer’s daughter, brought up in an all-male household until her father brings a female tutor to help Ethel acquire some feminine graces. Twice widowed, with two daughters and a stepdaughter, she is desperate to support her family, recognizing that in this era (vaguely late 18th century) marriage is the only way for young women to survive. Ethel is determined to hide the family’s reduced circumstances as much as possible so they can retain a position in society. Her own daughters, Mathilde and Rosamund, pitch it to help but her stepdaughter, Elin, refuses to do anything to help and utters pseudo-virtuous platitudes that irritate everyone else. When they learn the prince is giving a ball, Ethel knows it is the best chance for her daughters to meet young men of their station but she will need to sell everything that’s left in their home to dress the three young women and herself. However, triumph at the ball is not the automatic pathway to happiness Ethel hoped for and that is one of the ways Hochhauser surprises the reader.
What makes the book work is the character of Ethel: passionate and capable of jealousy, devoted to her daughters and determined to sacrifice anything and everything for them. At the same time, she is a young widow in her late 30s and does not even realize she longs for adult conversation and a few minutes to forget that financial ruin (and even physical ruin when the house starts falling apart) is imminent if she cannot find suitable marriages for her daughters. And in contrast to the evil stepmother reputation, Ethel may dislike her annoying stepdaughter but she has cared for her for years, even when her own daughters wondered by Elin never pulls her weight.
This is more of a historical novel than a fantasy – in fact, Ethel says she does not even believe in magic, which I suppose is the author’s tongue in cheek acknowledgment of the fact that she is retelling a fairy tale. The reimagined characters are convincing and many are appealing: Ethel’s daughters, their father, and Otto, the royal family’s counselor. While the story is a retelling of Cinderella, the author has added unexpected plot elements and twists that keep the reader captivated.
The relationship of Ethel and her hawk, Lucy, is intense for a number of reasons: Ethel trained the hawk herself after her husband’s death; hawking is a necessity not sport for her, because it enables her to feed her household, usually the man’s role but both her husbands died, leaving her and her daughters unprovided for; and being out in the forest with the hawk is liberating because it’s the only time she doesn’t have to pretend she is solvent or act like a proper matron. I was reminded of Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (in part, because the only other book I can think of focused on hawks is Falconer’s Lure about Nicola Marlow training a hawk) which is a fascinating but somewhat disturbing book because Helen becomes quite unbalanced about her hawk, and was gratified to read in the acknowledgments that the author relied heavily on it.
I was surprised by the frequent grammatical mistake Hochhauser makes. Using "I" instead of "me" (e.g., "between you and I") is called hypercorrection. It occurs when a writer or speaker overcorrects a perceived grammatical error, often stemming from the mistaken belief that "I" is always more proper than "me," when in fact "me" is the correct object pronoun. Shouldn’t her editor, Sarah Cantin, who was Phi Beta Kappa at Penn and is now the Editorial Director for Fiction at St. Martin’s, make these edits? I took a pencil and made the corrections in my copy!
This was my ninth book for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge, and one of the best books I have read this year.
Author: Rachel Hochhauser
Publication: St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 2026
Genre: Historical Fiction
Source: Library
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