By Isaac Hamlet
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Sweatshops are rarely included, mentioned, or thought about in fairy tales.

Because of this, the setting is taken advantage of in Sarah Prineas’s retelling and dark deconstruction of Cinderella.

Prineas is an employee of Prairie Lights and the author of the bestselling Magic Thief series. At 7 p.m. Friday, she will read from her new young-adult novel, Ash & Bramble at Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque St.

“The main reason I started writing [Ash & Bramble] was that I was moving,” Prineas said. “I took all of the anxiety and stress related to moving and channeled it into writing and ended up finishing it in five weeks.”

Prineas generally considers herself a “pantser” — a writer who tends to rely more on writing as ideas come than meticulously aligning every detail. But in this instance, the story hit her fully formed.

“While I was sewing a dress for my daughter, the idea struck me,” she said. “Where did the fairy godmother get Cinderella’s dress? What if there was a darker side to happily ever after?”

The story is a seedier take on the tale of Cinderella. In this world, the main character lives out her days as a seamstress in a sweatshop run in accordance with the will of the Fairy Godmother. The concept came in part from Prineas’ time as a member of the group Students Against Sweatshops in graduate school.

“[Young-adult] books are more in the moment for its characters,” Prineas said. “They’re much more intense, and they have more raw emotional content. My main character’s name is Pin; she’s snarky, edgy, and not a particularly nice person. In middle-grade books, the main character is more of a proxy for the reader, so this was an opportunity to have a more dimensional main character.”

Alison Day, an editor for the book at HarperCollins, described Pin as someone who challenges the narrative laid out for her by fate. A character who “would rather forge her own path than subject herself to someone else’s idea of happily ever after.”

“[The story] reveals cracks beneath what may seem a perfect façade of the fairy-tale life,” Day said. “[It conveys] that true happiness comes only when one seeks out his or her own dream, not one crafted or prescribed for them by others.”

Ash & Bramble has been an opportunity for Prineas. She’s stretched her writing outside of her usual domain of middle-grade fiction. In doing this, she feels she has nailed the stories ending.

This is a sentiment shared by Greg van Eekhout, the author of California Bones and one of the book’s beta readers.

“I was really fascinated by the workshop scenes, all the crafting of fairy-tale shoes under oppressive sweatshop conditions,” Eekhout said. “But the ending is triumphant, and hopeful, and romantic, and bittersweet and left me with that happy feeling of having finished a really wonderful book.”

WORDS
Sarah Prineas, Ash & Bramble reading
Where: Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque
When: 7 p.m. Friday
Admission: Free