Stolen
Ron Vitale
language
(, Nov. 6, 2012)
What really happened to Cinderella after she married the prince? Did she truly live "happy ever after"?Ron Vitale’s Stolen is a must-read for fans of Cinderella retellings. This second book in the Cinderella’s Secret Witch Diaries series is a direct sequel to Lost and will enchant readers who enjoy Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.Ten years after the first book Lost, a mysterious witch hunter finds Cinderella and gives her a message that Mab, the fairy tale Queen, searches to destroy her and he asks her to return to England. Fearing that she will be pulled back into the maelstrom of Napoleon’s war sprouting throughout Europe, Cinderella flees and wishes to remain free. Yet the further Cinderella runs from her fate, the more she is drawn back as she learns of a dark secret that forever changes her and sets her off on a course she might never survive . . . Stolen is packed with intrigue, magic and just the right amount of romance that readers of the Cinderella’s Secret Witch Diaries series have come to expect.Interview with the author from Digital Book Today:Ron Vitale turns the fairy tale on its head with a dark and twisted look into the private life of Cinderella and her struggle to find happily ever after in a world of magic and politics. Drawing rave reviews for its creepy and original imagining of the Cinderella fairy tale, Lost: Cinderella’s Secret Witch Diaries, and its sequels, Stolen and Found, are available in print and ebook through Amazon.Question: What inspired you to write the first book in the series (Lost: Cinderella’s Secret Witch Diaries)?Answer: My young daughter. Four years ago, my daughter was nearly three years old and she was infatuated with Princesses and anything pink. While reading to her one night, a question popped into my head: What really happens after the happily ever after? I started to think on that and then realized that I had an idea I could really sink my teeth into. After Cinderella marries the Prince, the story ends, but I wanted to go beyond that and show Cinderella’s struggle after she was married. I just used my imagination and let it run wild and my readers have really connected with what I’ve come up with in my series.Question: What’s the series about?Answer: It's about Cinderella’s coming to terms with her identity. All her life she’s been forced to do what she’s been told and it’s taken a toll on her. Now she’s at a point in her young life in which she has to decide where she really wants to go in life and who to be. If I could boil my book down to one phrase, it’s simply that women do not have to wait to be rescued by men. Women can rescue themselves. There’s no need to wait for a man to save them.Question: Tell us a little about your main character.Answer: Cinderella is young and still innocent. She’s married to the Prince but is still trying to find her voice and identity. Now a member of the royal court of England in the late 1700s, Cinderella has tremendous pressures on her to perform and carry the heir to the throne. She’s She’s timid, unsure of herself, and searching for a friend to help her find her way.All along Cinderella looks to others to save her, but slowly she realizes that her Fairy Godmother cannot always be at her side. She needs to find other sources of support to help her deal with tremendous challenges before she loses her way. She desperately searches to find the magic that once saved her from her stepmother and hopes that she can once again be saved. But in her innocence, she stumbles upon a secret that turns her life upside down and causes her to question all that she knows.