Just Ella, by Margaret Haddix (Simon and Schuster, 240 pp PB, 10-14 year-olds, grades 5-9, $4.99, 2001) Book 1 in the Palace Chronicles series. Review by Skye Anderson.
Unhappily Ever After
Ever wonder what happened after Prince Charming finds Cinderella? Wonder no more! Just Ella is the story of Ella (Cinderella) and "Charm" (Prince Charming) in the time between the ball and the wedding but our heroine is a modern day gal used to working, not used to conversing with ladies-in-waiting about the anticipated most stylish color of the next season.
Ella won the heart of Charm by being beautiful and she fell in love with the handsome Charm but they hardly know each other and Ella is busy with classes on decorum, religion, needlepoint, and so on.
About halfway through their engagement, Ella realizes she doesn't know enough about Charm to like him, let alone to love him - and the wedding looms. . . .though she and Charm do have dinner together every other night.
At war with the neighboring country and with 15-year-old Ella being cooped up in the palace all day, life is not as she had imaged it and when she loses her temper, she is imprisoned (shades of Henry the Eighth).
Just Ella is a fast read that neither middle-school girls nor adults will be able to put down until it is finished.
Although this is primarily a book for the younger set, it was written in a style that appeals to adults and it finally explains what really happened to Cinderella to enable her to attend the ball - was it her fairy godmother who turned a pumpkin into a carriage and mice into horses or was it the industrious Ella herself who talked a carriage drier into driving her to the ball.
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