The Blazekeeper of Bowmore House and Why I Wanted to Re-tell Cinderella

Hi friends! I am thrilled to share with you some behind-the-scenes stories about how I came to write the Blazekeeper of Bowmore House, a retelling of Cinderella. Blazekeeper will be out March 24, 2026, but you can pre-order it now online at your favorite online book-seller.

I am particularly excited about the story because I included all my favorite elements of the story: glass slippers, a fairy godmother, a handsome prince, a troubled stepmother, but with a lot of twists.

Let’s start with Cinderella. In fact, let’s start with Walt Disney. When I was growing up, we watched movies in movie theaters. I also grew up during a Disney princess desert. If you weren’t aware that there was one, let me explain: Disney Studios released Snow White, its first animated film, in 1937. Cinderella was released in 1950, and Sleeping Beauty in 1959. The next Disney princess was not seen until Ariel splashed on the scene in the Little Mermaid in 1989. A full 30 years later! Since then, we’ve been given a new princess – or at least, a live action version of a traditional princess – every 3-5 years.

As a kid, Cinderella was my princess. To this day, Cinderella is the only princess to whom I pledge fealty. I loved the story – Cinderella was taken for granted and abused by her family, but in the end, she was the most beautiful and, because of a happenstance of magic, she won everything.

When I had my own daughter, I couldn’t wait to share Cinderella with her – both the movie and any number of illustrated books. She liked Cinderella okay. But she didn’t love her. And actually, when I saw the movie after all those years, I didn’t love it either. And that surprised me.

This was somewhere around 2013, 2014. Frozen had joined the list of classic and beloved Disney princess movies. That I loved – two sisters who braved the loss of their parents and estrangement with each other. One sister was coping with a strange and terrifying power, the other trying to connect with her sister and a terrible secret.

In the end, Anna and Elsa each have a real hero’s journey that connects them deeply to their own heritages and to each other. There are cute boys along for the ride – in roles that are both supportive and destructive, but the boys are side dishes; Anna and Elsa stand firmly in the center. Frozen is a powerful sister story.

Disney responded to the positive public response by giving us Moana, a heroine who vehemently denied being a princess. The company graciously allowed budding songwriter Lin Manuel-Miranda the chance to write some songs, and guess what, those turned out pretty okay. (Oh, just kidding. The songs are awesome. You’re welcome!)

With these stories in mind, I entered into a dialogue with Cinderella. I will always love the classic story, but I realized that the 1950’s movie had little to say to us today. I wondered what the story was missing and what the story needed to become a true hero story.

Here are some (but not all) of my conclusions:

1.      A key theme in the Disney/Perrault version is jealousy between sisters. It’s the only emotion the step family has about Cinderella. The stepmother vehemently hates this girl because she has qualities – kindness and beauty – that her daughters completely lack. Right off the bat, that turns me off. In the actual world, kindness and beauty are swell, but how useful are they, really? Sisters experience all kinds of feelings about each other. Jealousy is one thing, but it’s just one.

2.      I started to see that there were two teams in this story – pro-Cinderella and anti-Cinderella – and all characters in the story had to pick a team.

3.      The main thing that kept running through my mind was: four women live in this house together.  They are all profoundly disconnected from each other and nobody – including the watcher or reader – has any idea what’s going on in these peoples’ inner lives. Now part of this might be because this is a fairy tale and the characters are supposed to be flat and single-noted. BUT what if we knew more? And what if there were connections nobody had ever told us about before?

I gave myself license to create connections between characters. The question I asked myself, the one that really got me, was this: What if Cinderella’s birth mother and wicked stepmother had been friends long before Cinderella herself was born? What if they’d had a powerful impact on each other? 

And what about the fairy godmother, what is her connection to this story? Why does this fairy godmother help this girl at this moment?

4.      The last thing I wondered over and over was: why would Cinderella stay in a situation where the family is so impoverished that they cannot hire help and the family members are too useless to help with the work while constantly letting her do everything? I thought of a lot of reasons – it’s her family home, after all, and as the last surviving member of that family, she might feel some obligation to protect the house. She might also have some feeling of ownership. And because fairy tale times were not known to be an era that encouraged women’s paths to education and fulfilling careers, she might feel that her options were severely limited. Still, I wanted a character who wouldn’t just thoughtlessly stay in a painful situation out of duty or lack of imagination.

I wanted a character who believed that if she had a chance, she would make a fine pirate.

5.      By the way, what about that prince? Is love at first sight a myth? I decided to work with the deep romance of a love that grows over time, between two people who knew each other well but hadn’t thought about each other that way before.

I braved the question: would Cinderella love him if he wasn’t a prince at all? I don’t want to give anything away …

In the end, The Blazekeeper of Bowmore House considers all of these elements and adjusts them like radio controls – just a smidge, but the characters land in distinctly different places.

In this book, I offer you a house perched on the cliffs over the sea in a country that feels like Scotland. The family inside includes a woman dressed in widow’s black, mourning the hardships of her life, along with her own two daughters and her second husband’s daughter. They call the third one Cinder, because she is constantly roaming the house, building and tending the fires, acting as the steward to the house itself. She’s a peculiar girl, though, often escaping to the edge of the cliffs. Who knows what she does there exactly, or who she might have chance to meet. They call her Cinder, and though that’s not the name her mother gave her, the name suits her: she herself is a fiery spark …