I gave both of these books 5/5 stars. This is a PG-13 new adult romance and a sequel. This is a complete series. (Cinder & Ella needs to be read first.)
Cinder & Ella (2014)
Synopsis
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.
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.
Review
Great Novel about Grief and Soulmates
As a book nerd, I was immediately grabbed by the summary: every-day girl is IM buddies with a movie star and doesn’t know it. They ‘met’ when he read her blog post about their favorite book, The Cinder Chronicles. Over the next 3 years, they become best friends even though they’ve never met. He’s texting with her when her life is destroyed by a horrible accident which kills her Mama and leaves her with 70% of her body burned and unable to walk. After being in a medically-induced coma for 3 weeks, she spends months in the hospital, enduring surgery after surgery and fighting to be able to walk again.
Things get harder when she gets out of the hospital: she moves to LA to live with the man who walked out on her when she was 8. He has the picture-perfect model wife (the woman he left with)
and her beautiful, blonde twin daughters. Ella is half-Chilean, with golden brown skin and brilliant blue eyes. To make matters worse, her father has packed up her things, but didn’t take some of her most important: author-signed books that she and Mama had collected, with a picture of them and the author in each one.
Adjusting to her new life is hard. The older of the twins encourages their school to bully her, there’s always tension at home, and she has no friends, save Cinder/Brian. Brian, as I mentioned, is a movie star. When she finally writes him to apologize for dropping off the face of the earth, he can’t believe it. When she didn’t answer his texts, he thought maybe she was mad. But when she didn’t blog, he knew something was wrong. That and never answering emails made him believe she was dead. So he’s overjoyed. They begin their correspondence and even start talking on the phone. Each is worried what the other will do if they find out the truth: he’s mega-star Brian Oliver, pretending to be engaged to his costar, and she’s Ellamara Rodriguez, a woman who is disfigured and 'disgusting' to look at.
Reading this book was wonderful. The chapters tell the story from either Ella’s or Cinder’s perspective. This gives us a chance to get to know and care about them both, and for us to root for their happily ever after. I *felt* Ella’s pain with her: pain as she adjusts to living with her father, pain from the ridicule at school, pain over her bumps with Cinder that inevitably happen. I’m not sure how many times I cried, but it was more than a few times. That may not sound like an endorsement, but it is. The book isn’t maudlin or depressing. I’m not someone who likes those types of reads and this is one of my favorite books I read all year, finished on the last day of the second decade of the 21st century. The book is realistic in its depiction of its characters and their conflict (no 2D characters here). No one is painted as the bad guy; even stepwitch sister Ana gets treated with empathy rather that painting her with the villain brush. This is story about loss and finding your way through it and I’m glad that it doesn’t rush things or drag. I’m eager to start the next book.
Also recommend the audiobook. While sometimes I read something sounding a different way, the female narrator did a great job of differentiating the characters as well as making the male voices believable.
Happily Ever After (2017)
Synopsis
The end of one story is often the beginning of another. Hollywood heartthrob Brian Oliver and his Cinderella princess Ellamara Rodriguez have finally found love outside the digital world. But leaving their anonymity behind creates a whole new set of obstacles for the nation’s new favorite sweethearts. With the stress of Brian’s fame, Ella's disapproving family, and the pressures of a new relationship weighing down on them, the It Couple quickly begins to wonder if they can hold on to their newfound joy, or if maybe happily ever after is only a fairy tale.
Review
This is the sequel to the #1 Bestselling novel Cinder & Ella from Kelly Oram.
“Like it or not, Brian, the moment you gave that Cinderella interview on The Kenneth Long Show, you changed her life. There’s no going back for her, so help her move forward. Help her make the best of a hard situation.”
Brian and Ellamara’s story continues and I’m so glad it did. We get to see them together and how they deal with being the new It couple in Hollywood.
It’s not all rainbows and unicorns. There’s tension between Brian and Ella’s Dad. A sleazy tabloid reporter causes trouble for everyone. Ella’s still coming to terms with the damage to her body. But it’s not all dark clouds either. So much good happens too.
The best thing in this sequel is getting to see their healthy relationship and the solid foundation it’s built upon. Even though Brian’s only 22 and Ella’s only 19, they deal with their life challenges with a great deal of maturity and always with love and dedication to each other. I’m so glad there was another chapter in their story and I can only hope that someday we’ll be blessed with a 3rd. I’d love to see their new opportunities pan out, the home that they have together, Scotty’s family and him *finally* snagging a girl, what happens to Ella’s friends and family and Brian’s parents. There’s plenty more story to tell as Cinder+Ella deal with life and its challenges together and hopefully we’ll get to read it. Besides, there were too few ‘women’ in this book. We need another book to make up for their absence. ;)
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