Gilded
Marissa Meyer
This is how Rumpelstiltskin begins:
There was once a miller who was poor, but he had one beautiful daughter. It happened one day that he came to speak with the king, and, to give himself consequence, he told him that he had a daughter who could spin gold out of straw.
As an adult reading that, you can't help but think, "What is wrong with you! Why the Holy Heck would you tell such a boneheaded lie?" As a kid, however, I wouldn't have taken much notice. If I thought about it at all, it would just be something like, "Grownups are weird." Which, by the way, is totally fair. Grownups do and believe any number of things that make no sense at all to a kid. Indeed, the Miller might point out that in the end, everything turns out well for his daughter -- she ended up Queen with a beautiful child. Of course, the Miller couldn't have predicted that, but if things were bad enough for him and her, "Let's roll the dice" was perhaps not a totally idiotic strategy.
Marissa Meyer doesn't have the luxury of simply dismissing weird grownups that kid-me had. If she's going to re-tell Rumpelstiltskin, then she has to justify that lie somehow. She does this convincingly -- the gold-into-straw lie makes sense when it is told. In fact, she does a pretty good job of making the rest of Rumpelstiltskin make sense, if only in the fairy tale way of making sense in the magical world in which the story takes place.
I had been expecting something like The Lunar Chronicles. That's not what Gilded is, and presumably not what Cursed will be. Gilded is much more conventional fantasy, unlike the cyberpunk Science Fiction of The Lunar Chronicles. It is not just Rumpelstiltskin -- Meyer also weaves in the classic story of the child-stealing Erlkönig and the Wild Hunt. It is much darker than The Lunar Chronicles (I like dark), and I enjoyed the use of these classic folklore elements. However, the world-building is overall not as creative as The Lunar Chronicles. It's still good, just a little more conventional fantasy-wise. There's also a romance, involving lots of swoony kisses, which was not really to my taste. As always, your mileage may vary! If swoony kisses are your jam, then good for you.
So, a good story overall. more classic fantasy and less creative world-building than The Lunar Chronicles. And it is now Saturday (5-Nov-2022) and I am ready for the release of Cursed on Tuesday.