Review of “Cinder & Ella”

Title: Cinder & Ella

Author: Kelly Oram

Publisher / Publishing Date: October 1st, 2014 by Bluefields (first published August 15th, 2014)

Summary: It’s been almost a year since eighteen-year-old Ella Rodriguez was in a car accident that left her crippled, scarred, and without a mother. After a very difficult recovery, she’s been uprooted across the country and forced into the custody of a father that abandoned her when she was a young child. If Ella wants to escape her father’s home and her awful new stepfamily, she must convince her doctors that she’s capable, both physically and emotionally, of living on her own. The problem is, she’s not ready yet. The only way she can think of to start healing is by reconnecting with the one person left in the world who’s ever meant anything to her—her anonymous Internet best friend, Cinder.
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Hollywood sensation Brian Oliver has a reputation for being trouble. There’s major buzz around his performance in his upcoming film The Druid Prince, but his management team says he won’t make the transition from teen heartthrob to serious A-list actor unless he can prove he’s left his wild days behind and become a mature adult. In order to douse the flames on Brian’s bad-boy reputation, his management stages a fake engagement for him to his co-star Kaylee. Brian isn’t thrilled with the arrangement—or his fake fiancée—but decides he’ll suffer through it if it means he’ll get an Oscar nomination. Then a surprise email from an old Internet friend changes everything.  

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I know that this is my third review that I have published in a row, but right now nothing is coming to mind and I am completely uninspired to write posts, so I am just reading books and writing reviews like crazy.

I found out about Kelly Oram’s Cinder & Ella after I first signed up for Kindle and as a free gift they gave me a free trail for Kindle Unlimited for a week and they told me to pick ten books to read during the seven days for free. That led me to look over the selection of books. To be honest, none of them really caught my eye. The one that actually caught my eye was Cinder & Ella because of its beautiful cover.

Cinder & Ella is about a girl named Ella Rodriguez and she gets in a car wreck, which leads to her mother dying and Ella covered in scars. Seventy percent of her body was burned in the wreck. Now, her father has remarried to a rich model looking woman and she also has two daughters of her own which are really wicked towards Ella.

The other half of the story revolves around Hollywood sensation Brian Oliver. He has a reputation for getting in trouble, so he is like Hollywood’s Bad Boy. He is going to be in a movie based on a book from the “Cinder Chronicles” series. The Druid Prince. However, Brian has to prove to everybody that he can be a mature young man instead of a troublemaker. That leads his management to set him up with a fake engagement with his co-star, Kaylee Summers.

This is a Cinderella retelling which I loved. The only retellings that I have actually read were the ones by Marissa Meyer, so to see something that was more cute and fluffy was a relief for me.

I loved how Ella wasn’t perfect. She had scars. She had to have a ton of surgeries. She wasn’t the perfect girl that you see on a movie screen. She had her imperfections, but that is what made Ella herself and I loved seeing a character who wasn’t the kind of girl that you see on a cereal box.

Brian kind of drove me bananas sometimes. He was a bit sexist, obnoxious. but I loved how his character was. He often cussed, but it was words that I have heard before, so that didn’t really bother me a lot. I could also see him as the next Justin Bieber or the next Harry Styles and that made me swoon, come back alive again, and swoon again over how handsome Brian was in my head.

To be honest I think that everybody should read Cinder & Ella because it is definitely one of heartfelt stories that you will never forget. Plus, the second book is coming out on Valentine’s Day of this year! ★★★★✩

You May Also Like…

Girl Online by Zoe Sugg

Autumn Falls by Bella Thorne

P.S. I Like You by Kasie West

Have you read Cinder & Ella yet? Are you super pumped for the sequel like I am? What is your favorite retelling? Comment below and let’s chat about books!