“I’d like you to meet your new stepmother,” says her father, “and two stepsisters!”

“Fuck that,” says Cinder, and takes a Greyhound into the city. She gets a minimum-wage job and a small but decent apartment; she saves everything she can and studies hard for her GED. Her essay dazzles the admissions at Pitt, and with a scholarship plus some smart loans, she’s on her way to an MBA cum laude. Soon she’s the CFO of a Fortune 500 company! She drives a vintage Boxster and smokes only experimental CIA weed.

How’s that for a fairy tale, you little bastard?