Review by Kelly Jarvis: Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser

Pitched as a story where Bridgerton meets Circe, Rachel Hochhauser’s Lady Tremaine far surpassed my already high expectations, easily becoming my favorite new read! Told from the breathtaking perspective of the twice-widowed Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley, this novel will turn your perceptions of the Cinderella story inside out while also rewriting the script of all fairy tale plots passed down through the generations.

Hochhauser’s choice to filter a well-known tale through the voice of a mature protagonist is brilliant, and her novel quickly moves beyond the fairy tale tropes on which it is built. The famous wicked stepmother of folklore is given a fully-realized past that informs the way she navigates a world at odds with her downtrodden circumstances. Lady Tremaine, a woman whose very name is a reflection of her complicated history, has lived and loved. She has been raised to straddle the worlds of the gentry and the gentile, she has learned the art of commanding blood-thirsty falcons, and she fiercely protects and prepares her fatherless daughters, Matilda and Rosamund, to face a life where appearances craft reality. Her stepdaughter Elin, bound by the aristocratic dictates of her deceased mother’s conduct manual, inhabits a world of platitudes and dreams, fainting and fawning at the prospect of labor and only exerting herself to attend a ball where she meets a prince bent on marrying a submissive wife. When the romantic relationship between Elin and the prince is exposed as less than ideal, Lady Tremaine must decide where her loyalties to her daughters, her stepdaughter, and herself rest as she makes choices which will affect not only her family but the future of the kingdom.

I absolutely loved every word of this book! I am well-versed in traditional fairy tale study and have read countless retellings of fairy tale plots, but Hochhauser’s narrative had me on the edge of my seat, gasping as her gorgeous prose twisted old tropes and symbols into something entirely new. “Stories are made by organizing and rewriting details,” Lady Tremaine says, “you can arrange them in so many ways.” Hochhauser’s deft rearrangement of the Cinderella story does far more than filter it through the antagonist’s voice; it pushes readers to contemplate their own biases, rewiring the forest we have been taught to fear as a potent symbol of human life itself. Hochhauser does not shy away from the female rage that comes of living within a patriarchal environment, but unlike other writers who fantastically twist traditional plots to right the wrongs of the past in unproductive ways, she distills that rage into a force as beautiful and as believable as the balances found in nature, showing how it as necessary for survival and presenting it as both glorious and savage. Lady Tremaine’s characters, scenes, dialogue, symbols, and commentary are a feast for the senses; even while in the grip of a story that delighted me with surprising twists and turns, I knew I was in the hands of a writer who was consciously and beautifully transforming my perceptions of the lives we lead and the stories we tell.

Lady Tremaine is more than a book about happily-ever-afters. It is a poignant and powerful exploration of identity, love, life, loss, and motherhood that will force readers to rethink the stories that have shaped them. This is a book I would teach in my Fairy Tale and Folklore classes, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone who enjoys novels that are both entertaining and transformative. You can find it here.

Thank you to NetGalley for a free copy of the book in exchange for a fair review.

Kelly Jarvis teaches writing and literature at Central Connecticut State University and works as the Contributing Writer for The Fairy Tale Magazine and a Recurring Columnist for Eternal Haunted Summer. Her debut novella, Selkie Moon, was selected as a semi-finalist in the 2025-2026 Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship, and her first novel, Sea and Stars, a real-world reimagining of Beauty and the Beast, publishes in July 2026.

Visit Kelly online at kellyjarviswriter.com.