{Short Story Sunday} Review: Finding Cinderella by Colleen Hoover

Short stories are awesome.  They give us in-depth insight into characters, providing anecdotal proof of why some characters are they way they are.  They entertain by creating a certain mood or focusing on a singular effect...some instance in a previous body of work (or one to follow) that might have been glossed over or ignored completely in a longer novel. 

And so I would like to highlight some short stories and novellas set in worlds I've already come to love and learn a little more about some of the secondary characters in my favorite novels.   In addition to offering up a mini review of these short works of fiction,  I'll be underscoring some of my favorite aspects.

This week I'm featuring Colleen Hoover's FREE follow-up to her phenomenal Hopeless series:

Title: Finding Cinderella
Author: Colleen Hoover
Series: Hopeless, book #2.5
Publisher: Atria Books
Publication Date: October 14, 2013
Source: free, courtesy of the author
Purchase: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

This novella is a companion novel to the Hopeless series, but can be read as a standalone.

A chance encounter in the dark leads eighteen-year-old Daniel and the girl who stumbles across him to profess their love for each other. But this love comes with conditions: they agree it will only last one hour and it will only be make-believe.

When their hour is up and the girl rushes off like Cinderella, Daniel tries to convince himself that what happened between them only seemed perfect because they were pretending it was perfect. Moments like that with girls like her don’t happen outside of fairytales.

One year and one bad relationship later, his disbelief in insta-love is stripped away the day he meets Six: a girl with a strange name and an even stranger personality. Daniel soon realizes the way he pretended to feel about Cinderella and the way he really feels about Six may not be so different after all. Especially when the two loves of his life end up being one in the same.

Unfortunately for Daniel, finding Cinderella doesn’t guarantee their happily ever after…it only further threatens it.

I loved Daniel's character in Losing Hope.  I thought he provided much needed comedic relief during some really trying times for Holder.  And I knew that I had to read more of his story, especially after he revealed some sketchy details about the closet incident.

Who knew Daniel would end up being such a romantic guy, though?  He's not perfect, but he's still pretty awesome as a love interest.  I thought it would be difficult for Hoover to make me like him as much as I liked Holder's character, but she did a fantastic job of laying Daniel bare and proving that he was just as worthy of his own story as Holder was.

I wasn't expecting such an emotionally-charged story, especially considering it's a story about Daniel and Six, who didn't seem to be overly emotive in either of the previous books.  I was simply expecting to find out who the girl in the closet was.  To find out what Six was up to while she was away in Italy.  And I got my answers to those questions plus a whole lot more.

I definitely recommend this free novella if you're already a fan of Hoover's, though I do recommend reading the first two books in the series first, since Finding Cinderella felt like a big inside joke that the author was finally letting us in on.  And I mean that in the best possible way.  I also want to applaud the author 1) for writing this story and filling in the gaps and 2) for making this story available to her fans for FREE.  No question that I would have paid for it, but I appreciate authors even more when they show their appreciation for their fans by doing us a solid, like providing extra content for free when they could easily charge us for the privilege to read it.

the Hopeless books

 

About the author:

Colleen Hoover is the New York Times bestselling author of Slammed, Point of Retreat, Hopeless, and This Girl. Colleen lives in Texas with her husband and their three boys.

Find Colleen:

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