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by Mindi Meltz (Author)
The Ritual of Forgetting is the first book of the After Ever After trilogy, in which the heroines of four archetypal fairy tales transform through wicked-witch magic into true female sovereigns, in a mythical expression of the more complex, intimate love story after the "ever after."
In this first book, Ella (Cinderella), ashamed of the forbidden witchery that transformed her from slave to princess, struggles to claim self-worth and the fickle love of an unfaithful prince. When plague decimates her kingdom, thrusting her into an unexpected position of responsibility which terrifies her, she looks to the encrypted goddess in her religion to gain a voice.
Priestess Lemara (Sleeping Beauty) wakes from the Dark Faerie's cursed sleep to find her primeval culture colonized by Ella's. Shocked and enraged by the transition from her matriarchal, dancing culture to her new husband's hierarchical, patriarchal one, she seeks through dream and ritual to reclaim a childhood past which is nearly destroyed. But his people suffer also from a shadow wound--the separation from their mother culture--whose pain wreaks unconscious havoc in this prophesied marriage.
Mina (Beauty and the Beast) adjusts to the esthetic, meditative life her husband's people have adopted to atone for the greedy destruction of magical creatures, which earned them the Dark Faerie's curse. But while bearing the weight of family loss, miscarriage, and her outcast husband's depression, she yearns secretly for the wild-man she first desired--and the animal power he awakened.
Rowan (Snow White), fabled daughter of the Dark Faerie who cursed them all, can only escape the brutal claims of her war-mongering prince through invisibility. Raised without love or consciousness by demigods of old, cursed by a mirror, she tries to disappear even from her own story. The huntsman who truly sees her cannot free her, because she cannot see herself.
Each woman takes her first steps into the responsibilities of a royal life according to cultural expectations, while kings and husbands plot war. But as their stories entwine and kingdoms conflict, each comes face to face with the Dark Faerie witch who has haunted them all, vilified in every fairy tale, whose seeming "curse" is actually the shadowy key to queendom. For Ella, it is the rage she discovers beneath her habitual insecurity when confronted with Lemara's defense of her people. For Mina it is the confidence gained by a fragile, faraway friendship with Ella, belied by the torment of seemingly selfish desires. For Rowan it is the real, human need called up by Priestess Lemara, who challenges kings and reaches across worlds to make love to her. And for Lemara it is the dream she finally remembers from her hundred year sleep, which demands surrender to a more ancient and spiritual love story.
