Welcome back to the Reading Rec series, where I rant about my favorite books and talk about how reading and analyzing them can make us better writers! This month, I’m covering tropes and how to adapt them to different stories, and there’s no better genre for this than folktales. Because these stories are so ingrained in pop culture, everyone already knows the main characters, plot beats, and motifs, which makes them perfect to translate into retellings. Not only does this series have a great premise, it also has great cover design. Even if you’ve never read this series, you can guess the main character of each book.

This article will focus on the first book, Cinder, and will contain spoilers. At first, I tried to write this article by explaining the tropes out of context, but in the end they were worked into the plot so well that it was impossible. These books are fairly predictable in terms of overall plot by nature of being fairy tale retellings, but there are some interesting twists within the way they connect, so proceed at your own discretion if you’d like to read this series with a fresh view. Content Warnings for plague, fire/burns, mind-control, and fantasy racism. Rereading these books in 2021 is really interesting, because while they don’t predict every aspect of a pandemic, they still hold up in a lot of ways and the story and characters are as interesting as ever. I meant to skim the story to find the certain quotes I wanted to use, but ended up sitting down and reading the whole book in an afternoon!