When her father moved to England and married his new wife, Ella never thought she 
would be orphaned and left in her ‘care’, or that her only sanctuary would become the animal sanctuary where she spent every moment between her chores. The problem was, with so many stray and abused animals, the place was haemorrhaging money faster than it could make any. If things didn’t change soon it would be forced to close its doors forever. She could not let that happen. She had wrote to the royal secretary more times than she could count, approached every avenue she could in the hope to secure funding for this charity, all to no avail. She has one final chance, at the masquerade ball she must speak with the prince in person, pitch her case. She had one chance, but the person under the mask was not who she had expected, and she was not like all the other girls who had approached him that night. She thought she would never see him again, but instead he sought her out, but he didn’t sweep her off her feet, he stole her, and now she is a prisoner of the heir apparent everyone loves to hate. The man with a dark past and an even darker disposition.
Stealing Cinderella by A. Zavarelli is one of those books that’s going to keep you up all night until you hit that final page. On the surface it is a dark fairy tale romance, but there is so much more going on adding depth to the world, characters, and their situations. Ella and Thor have their own complicated pasts, their own ghosts. Both have been broken in different ways and they are, perhaps, the only people who cold make each other feel whole again. But Thor doesn’t want whole. He wants something that is purely his, a toy to dominate and hurt, a person to fill with the darkness he carries. He just doesn’t count of Ella’s light. He doesn’t care for it either, he had too much going on his life to give a damn about what his little toy is feeling, except…he can’t help but be drawn in, and the more she unravels him the more he makes her suffer. The dark erotic scenes of this book are penned with a skilled hand and take the reader through every torturous moment, every sweet surrender. I thought this was a great spin on the classic fairy tale and enjoyed every minute, so much so that when I crawled into bed last night to read I had no idea it would hold me hostage until that final page was consumed.
K.J's Athenaeum 