Elizabeth Lim is a beloved name in certain corners of YA fantasy. Her previous work, including A Forgery of Fate, built her a reputation for gorgeous world-building and deeply felt characters. Her adult debut Fishbone Cinderella just hit shelves this week.
I came to this book with high expectations and it did not disappoint. With Fishbone Cinderella,
published by Del Rey Books on July 28, 2026, Lim has delivered a multigenerational saga that is quieter and more emotionally complex than anything in her back catalogue, and it's all the better for it.
Two stories, two timelines
The novel follows two women across different eras and their stories are braided together in light of the titular fairytale. The first is Ha Yut Ying, a young girl living in Guangdong, China, in the 1940s during the Japanese occupation. When soldiers close in, she escapes by turning invisible. Her mother, a woman whose dreams show her glimpses of the future, recognizes what has happened and tells Yut Ying the truth. Turns out, the women in their family carry a certain curse and this invisibility is its latest form.
Before sending her daughter away for her own safety, she gives her a gold bracelet with links shaped like fishbones. After the war, Yut Ying is sent to live with her father and his second wife in Hong Kong. Instead of safety, she finds a stepmother who resents her, work in the family shoe factory in place of the schooling she longed for and the slow burial of her dream of becoming a singer.Â
A chance collision on a bicycle, and a lost bracelet, brings a young man named Tommy Yeung into her life and changes everything. I found Yut Ying's sections almost impossible to put down. Lim renders the experience of a person being quietly diminished and finding the will to persist anyway, with real grace.
The second timeline belongs to Marigold, Yut Ying's daughter, growing up in 1960s San Francisco. Marigold has her own inherited gift: she can see the things that haunt people from their past. But she cannot see into her mother's past and her mother has never offered it willingly. Their relationship is loving and fractured in equal measure because of a single childhood moment when Marigold watched her mother simply vanish in front of her eyes.
When Yut Ying's condition deteriorates and she begins disappearing involuntarily, Marigold flies with her back to Hong Kong, determined to uncover the family secrets she was never told and break the curse before it takes her mother completely.
Folktale at the heart of it
Fishbone Cinderella is in many ways a retelling of Ye Xian, an ancient Chinese folktale that scholars consider one of the oldest Cinderella stories ever recorded, predating the French version by nearly a thousand years. In the original tale, a girl is befriended by a magical golden fish, which her jealous stepmother kills. She prays to the bones of the fish, which grant her beautiful clothes and golden slippers. She attends a festival, loses a slipper and is eventually found by a king who has been searching for the woman who fits it.
Lim has taken that old story and built her own beautiful and imaginative setting around it. The shoe factory, the fishbone bracelet, the stepmother, the invisibility, the idea of a woman who wants to be truly seen — all of it connects, at some level, to the original tale. I kept noticing the echoes and feeling pleased when I caught one, though the novel does not necessarily need you to.
A different kind of fantasy retelling
Earlier this year I read Year of the Mer by L.D. Lewis, a dark and epic reimagining of The Little Mermaid story built around the consequences that fairy tale choices leave for the next generation. It got me interested in this particular kind of story where old magic meets real history, and of daughters reckoning with what their mothers left behind. Fishbone Cinderella arrived at exactly the right moment and gave me everything I was looking for, with a tenderness that stayed with me long after I finished it.
The novel's greatest strength is how it handles the relationship between Yut Ying and Marigold. These are two women who love each other and cannot quite reach each other. Yut Ying has learned to disappear as a way of protecting herself. Marigold has a gift for seeing into people's pasts, and yet her own mother remains opaque to her. That tension drives the whole book.
Lim writes her settings with real care. Wartime Guangdong is spare and frightening. Postwar Hong Kong hums with ambition and social performance, questions of who belongs and who gets put to work. And 1960s San Francisco, where Chinese immigrant families are building lives in a city that is not quite open to them, has this loneliness that feels specific and true. The novel does not over-explain any of this though.
This is also not a fantasy novel in the traditional sense. Lim is more interested in what magic costs and how it moves through a family over generations. This approach serves the story very well and is more affecting than any grand magical set piece could have been. Readers who come expecting high fantasy will find something more real, and for me that was the right call entirely.
Verdict
Fishbone Cinderella is the kind of book that earns a place on your permanent shelf. I finished it in a single long sitting and then needed a while before I could move on to anything else, which is always a good sign.
It is warm and truly moving. Elizabeth Lim has written a novel that honors where she came from as a storyteller while growing into something entirely her own. It is one of the most memorable books of 2026 and it deserves every reader it finds.
Rating: 4.5/5 stars
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