Cinderella Is Dead

Cinderella Is Dead is a young adult novel by Kalynn Bayron, published in 2020 and set in the same world as the Cinderella story, two hundred years after her death.

Sophia Grimmins is sixteen, and the kingdom she lives in has turned a fairy tale into law: every girl must present herself at the Annual Ball so that the men of the kingdom can select wives, and the girls who are not chosen disappear from public view. Sophia has no interest in competing for a suitor, because she is in love with Erin, her childhood friend. At the ball she makes a desperate decision to run, and ends up hiding in Cinderella's mausoleum, where she meets Constance, the last known descendant of Cinderella and her stepsisters. The two of them agree to try to bring down the king, and in the process they discover that the version of Cinderella's story everybody has been taught leaves out most of what happened.

Bayron writes a retelling that takes the details of the familiar story seriously as instruments of power, and her heroine's rebellion is against both a ruler and a legend.