Whitley’s review of A Cinderella Christmas by Holly Kingston

Lucy Tilley dreams of a career in show business. But this isn’t quite what she had in mind…

This year’s Cinderella pantomime is the hottest production in town. What’s more, Lucy is starring alongside Ryan Aspall: famous TV actor, sex symbol and potential love of her entire life. One teeny problem – Lucy is tripping the light fantastic as… the back end of the comedy cow. Surely nothing kills a flirty moment quite like wearing a massive set of udders?

At least she has the support of glamorous (if potentially flammable) Charmaine; a reality star diva of a Cinderella, who Lucy is completely fascinated by. But behind the fame and beauty, Charmaine is not all she seems.

With more drama off the stage than on it, and everyone wanting to be star of the show, will Lucy find the confidence to make it out of the cow suit and into the spotlight this Christmas?

This book had nothing to do with Cinderella. 🙁 Technically speaking, the play going on in the background was Cinderella, but we never got to see the play or have it influence the book in any way.  If they’d been doing a production of Pinocchio, everything would have gone on just the same.  It’s sort of a minor point, but since I got into this book on the promise of a rags-to-riches theme, I felt let down.

But on to the actual book.  Can’t say I was much of a fan.  Lucy was far too much of a doormat for my tastes, and her narration read as juvenile.  I would have pegged her as a teenager instead of 26 year-old if the text hadn’t told me otherwise.  The majority of the plot was just “Lucy refuses to do stuff because she’s a doormat” and frankly I prefer my drama to be of the doing over the not-doing sort.  I found the entire thing rather tedious, especially since theaters should have much more drama going on.  In fact, we didn’t get much payoff for the fact that this was a pantomime.  Very few details about the production or the company, almost no sense of the background characters or atmosphere.

Charmaine was far more interesting to me, even though the book did everything short of actually using the words “skanky ho bag.”  Every other line in a scene with her had something to do with her dyed hair or her plastic surgery, and the narration never wasted an opportunity to mock her for both.  Throughout the first part of the book, Lucy tried to convince us that she looked up to/admired/liked Charmaine, but I never bought it thanks to how incessant and cruel her descriptions of the other woman were.

In the end, I just felt that this book had nothing to offer me.  The Cinderella angle didn’t exist, the theater production was gutted, the romance barely deserves a mention because it was so mild, and Lucy’s confidence issues were treated like an on-off switch at the end there.  The book brushed up on a lot of things that could have been interesting, but it was too timid to commit to any of them, so in the end I was just bored.

Rating: 2 out of 5

This book is available from Novelicious Books.  You can buy it here in e-format.