2004 fantasy, first of a series. Elena Klovis has a wicked stepmother
and two ugly sisters. But when they leave her to look after the house
while they flee debt collectors and seek good marriages elsewhere, she
has a plan…
But what she doesn't know about is the Tradition, an impersonal
force which encourages people into the archetypes of story. She was
supposed to be Cinderella and marry the handsome prince… but the
only available prince is eleven or so. Instead, after nobody will take
her on at the hiring fair since they're afraid of her stepmother's
return, Elena finds herself apprenticed to a Fairy Godmother.
And their job is to… steer things. The Tradition is just as likely
to make a young woman a Fair Rosalinda, seduced by a king, murdered by
his queen and getting posthumous revenge after she's made into some
sort of musical instrument, as it is to give her a happy ever after. A
Godmother, insofar as she is able, can try to sort things out, in
particular combining story elements to let them sort each other out
(so the Tragic Prince-Poet obsessed with darkness can win the heart of
the Evil Sorceress and bring them both to a better place).
Apprenticeship done, one of Elena's first tasks is to be the old
beggar-woman at the crossroads who administers the test of courtesy.
But one of the failing princes annoys her with his assumption of
superiority, so she turns him into a donkey and takes him home…
Things go on from there, and given how ready Lackey has been in
earlier works to fall into cliché I was very positively surprised by
how readily and irreverently the story treats fantasy tropes, If the
Tradition is a bit malleable for the sake of plot, well, nobody really
knows how it works in the first place.
It is rather a story of two halves, with the first setting up the
world and Elena's situation and the second being a more personal story
of redemption and romance (with some evil-fighting along the way). But
I like the setting, and if the characters are a bit on the thin side
they still work.
(This was published by Harlequin's Luna imprint, romantasy about
twenty years before it got trendy, and I suspect the sex scenes were
added to make it more marketable to them. They don't seem to me to add
much to the story.)