A Sagebrush Cinderella

By Max Brand

A dance offers nineteen-year-old Jacqueline 'Jac' During the chance to become someone the mountain desert has never seen. Capable and tomboyish, she works at her father's crossroads hotel while privately longing for romance, beauty and recognition as a woman. When she is forbidden to attend the gathering, she adopts the identity of 'Jacqueline Silvestre', an elegant visitor from the East, and turns disguise into an audacious act of self-invention. Clothing, cosmetics, language and performance become Jac's means of testing how readily society confuses appearance with identity. Her transformation draws attention, but it also places her between the ordinary role assigned to her and the romantic fantasy she has created. The crowded dance hall and a river ford provide vivid stages for a western romance that combines adventure with comic social drama, allowing questions of gender, freedom and female agency to emerge through action rather than abstraction. Beneath its fairy-tale pattern lies a sharp fascination with the ways identity can be fashioned, displayed and judged. Jac is neither simply rescued nor passively transformed: she participates in creating the woman others are prepared to recognise. That tension between inner self and outward presentation gives the novelette its distinctive energy, while the frontier setting makes reinvention both possible and precarious. This book was out of print for decades and is now republished by Alpha Editions. It has been restored for today's and future generations. This edition is not just a reprint - it's a collector's item and a cultural treasure.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9378415660
• ISBN13: 9789378415661
• Release Date: February 2027
• Publisher: Alpha Edition
• Length: 54 Pages
• Weight: 0.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"