A beautiful retelling

I was delighted to be offered an audiobook edition of G Lawrence's second Retold From Old series fairytale novel, The Slipper And The Tree, which is a retelling of the classic Cinderella story. It is beautifully narrated by Charles Johnston and I was entranced during the hours I spent following young Nion, her witch aunt, Gudrun, and of course her stepmother and stepsisters, Niamh, Edith and Rhiannon. Lawrence has fleshed out each of these traditional characters into genuine women so, while The Slipper And The Tree does pretty much follow the overall narrative arc I expected, it also takes diversions allowing me to really understand these people's motivations.

I don't actually know whether The Slipper And The Tree was intentionally written to be read aloud, but I felt it worked perfectly in this format. The omniscient narrator meanders into discussions of grief and love, women's roles in society because of (and in spite of) men's expectations, the dreams of parsnips, and the real conversations had inside libraries. The novel is steeped in a fairytale's magical atmosphere, but with the depth and social illumination of strong historical fiction. So I loved the idea of the rooms within the witch trees, and also the reasoning by which a woman might just maim her body in order to marry an egocentric prince.

If you love reading fairytales and folk stories, I highly recommend picking up a copy of The Slipper And The Tree.

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