Book Club Questions for Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochauser

Let’s start with a question before we even get to the book: when you picture the wicked stepmother, what do you see?

Most of us have the same image. Cold eyes. A cruel smile. A cat called Lucifer. The Disney version of Lady Tremaine has been burned into our collective imagination since 1950, and for 76 years she has existed in pop culture as shorthand for a specific kind of female villain: the woman who hates the innocent girl, for no real reason, just because she does.

Rachel Hochhauser looked at that character and asked a question nobody had quite asked before. Not “what if she was secretly good?” Not “what if Cinderella was actually terrible?” But something more uncomfortable than either: what if the story we’ve been told was just incomplete?

Lady Tremaine is the March 2026 Reese’s Book Club pick and Hochhauser’s debut novel. It is one of the most satisfying things I’ve read in years, and I say that as someone who usually rolls her eyes at fairy tale retellings. This one is different. It earns its premise completely.

Get the book: Amazon | Bookshop.org

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The Setup (And Why It Works)

Her full name is Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley, which tells you something about her immediately. She goes by Ethel. Twice widowed, broke, running a crumbling manor on fumes and sheer stubbornness, she is raising two daughters of her own and one stepdaughter, Elin, who is grief-stricken, prickly, and almost impossible to reach.

We first meet Ethel in the woods, poaching rabbits on the king’s land with her trained peregrine falcon, because otherwise her family does not eat. The respectability she works so hard to project is entirely a performance, and she knows it. When the royal ball arrives and a chance at a future materialises, she pursues it with the focused desperation of someone who has watched what happens to women who run out of options. Then the wrong daughter gets the prince. Then a royal secret surfaces. Then everything gets considerably darker and more complicated than you expected a Cinderella retelling to go.

Kirkus called it “a bold and beautifully written examination of a mother’s love.” Booklist noted it has “vivid descriptions that keep the grim in the fairy tale.” Both are right. And Emilia Hart, author of Weyward, said Hochhauser “unpicks this old fairy tale and weaves it into a feminist war cry.” Also right.

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Before Your Book Club Meets: One Thing to Try

Go around the group and have everyone describe their original image of Lady Tremaine, from whatever version of Cinderella they grew up with. Disney, the 1997 Brandy/Whitney Houston film, a picture book, the original Perrault tale, anything. Then, after you have discussed the book, do it again. See how much has shifted. It is a good frame for the whole conversation.

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Book Club Questions for Lady Tremaine

Start Here: The Villain Question

1. Before you read this book, what was your mental image of Lady Tremaine? Did the novel change it, complicate it, or just add detail to something you already suspected?
2. Hochhauser does not redeem Ethel exactly, she contextualises her. There is a difference. Did you find yourself rooting for Ethel, understanding her, or just watching her with a kind of grim recognition? Is it possible to do all three at once?
3. The novel argues that the “wicked stepmother” label is a story told by people who only had access to part of the story. Do you think that is a generous reading of a fairy tale, or does it feel true to how women have historically been written about?

On Ethel Herself

4. Ethel grew up without a mother, surrounded by brothers, taught to perform femininity rather than inherit it naturally. How much does that origin shape the kind of mother she becomes, both to her daughters and (or not) to Elin?
5. She is simultaneously the most capable person in the room and the most constrained by the room’s rules. How does she navigate that? Does it make her more sympathetic, more dangerous, or both?
6. The crumbling manor that looks fine from the outside is a fairly obvious metaphor for Ethel’s life, and Hochhauser leans into it deliberately. Did it feel heavy-handed, or did it earn its weight by the end?
7. One of the most striking things about Ethel is how little she allows herself to want things for herself. What does she actually want, when she is honest? Does she even know?

On Motherhood, Fierce and Otherwise

8. The book presents motherhood not as gentle self-sacrifice but as something closer to warfare, something that requires ruthlessness and calculation as much as love. Did that ring true to you? Is there something in that version of motherhood that is never said out loud but should be?
9. Ethel’s love for her daughters, Matilda and Rosamund, is fierce and obvious. Her relationship with her stepdaughter Elin is almost the inverse. The novel gives reasons for that distance, but are they enough? Where does responsibility end and preference begin?
10. She raises her daughters to be practical, self-sufficient, and unsentimental, qualities she considers protective. Did you see that as a gift or a loss? What does it cost them?
11. By the end, when Ethel is forced to choose between the security she has spent her whole life chasing and the wellbeing of the stepdaughter who has never warmed to her, what does her choice tell us about who she really is?

On the World the Book Builds

12. The kingdom has no name, the time period is vague, and there is no magic. That is a deliberate choice. What does stripping out the fantasy elements do to a Cinderella story? Does it make it feel more or less like a fairy tale?
13. The social system in this book, where a woman’s survival is tied almost entirely to marriage and male protection, is presented as specific to a historical period but also feels uncomfortably familiar. Where did you feel that friction most?
14. The royal family’s secret changes everything once it surfaces. Without giving it away for those still reading: did you feel the book earned that darker turn, or did it feel like a different novel had started?

On Cinderella, and the Stories We Inherit

15. Elin, this novel’s Cinderella, is not quite what you expect. How does Hochhauser rewrite her, and what does that do to your reading of the original story?
16. The Cinderella story has been told in almost every culture on earth. Why do you think we keep returning to it? And what does it mean that the character we collectively decided to make the villain is the one woman in the story who is a mother, not a girl?
17. Wicked by Gregory Maguire is often cited as the original “villain gets a voice” novel. If you’ve read it, how does Lady Tremaine compare as an exercise in narrative sympathy? Does Hochhauser go further, or stay more grounded?

The Questions That Will Start Arguments

18. Is Ethel a good person? Not a sympathetic one, not a justified one, but genuinely good? Does the book want you to answer yes?
19. The novel has been compared to Bridgerton (for its romance and period setting) and to Circe by Madeline Miller (for its feminist reclamation of a maligned woman). Which comparison felt more accurate to you, and is there a third book that came to mind?
20. Rachel Hochhauser is also the co-founder of Piecework, a puzzle company. One review described this novel as feeling like “a completed Rubik’s cube,” where everything slots into place. Did the ending feel earned and complete, or did something feel unresolved?
21. If someone made a film of this, which version of Lady Tremaine would you be most afraid of seeing, the Disney cartoon faithful or the gritty literary adaptation? And who do you cast as Ethel?

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If You Loved This, These Are Next

• Circe by Madeline Miller (Bookshop.org) — The book this one is most compared to, and deservedly so. A mythological woman reclaimed from the margins of someone else’s story, told in gorgeous prose. If Hochhauser got you, Miller will finish you off.
• Wicked by Gregory Maguire (Bookshop.org) — The original villain-gets-a-voice novel. Darker and weirder than the musical it spawned, and a useful companion piece for thinking about what we do to women who don’t fit.
• Weyward by Emilia Hart (Bookshop.org) — Hart blurbed Lady Tremaine and you can feel why. Multigenerational, atmospheric, about women and wildness and the ways the world tries to contain both.
• The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (Bookshop.org) — Another Reese’s pick, another historical novel about a woman navigating a world built entirely to contain her. If the political and domestic danger in Lady Tremaine gripped you, this one is essential.
• All the Ever Afters by Danielle Teller (Bookshop.org) — For when you are not ready to leave this version of the story behind. Another Cinderella retelling from the stepmother’s perspective, more quietly devastating than Lady Tremaine but working in the same territory.

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About Rachel Hochhauser

Rachel Hochhauser grew up in Santa Barbara, California, studied at NYU, and earned a master’s in fiction from USC. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two daughters, and is also the co-founder of Piecework, a puzzle company with something of a cult following. Lady Tremaine is her first novel, published by St. Martin’s Press in the US and Orion in the UK. Kate Quinn, author of The Briar Club, called her “a major new talent to watch.” Hard to argue.

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Which question sent your group sideways? And did anyone change their mind about Lady Tremaine by the end of the night? Drop it in the comments.