Stepsister, by Leah Cypress

 Stepsister is set in the Cinderella fairy tale, but a very different imagining of it.  Prince Ciar has become king and has a bastard brother that he and no one else trusts.  Ella is now queen.  She was allowed to take vengeance against her stepfamily, killing the stepmother and one sister but letting the other (in this telling Jacinda) live.  Five years have gone by and things are a bit more sour.

Mostly this is a royal house tension story now.  Lots of people walking very thin lines.  Good if you like that sort of thing, and a good attempt at adding depth to the characters, but it's far enough removed from the original that to me it doesn't feel like the same space. 

Cypess, Leah - Nanny's Day

Now here's a fun one.  Nanny's Day is social speculative fiction--purely social.  You don't see that a lot.  There's "hard" science fiction that is based on a technological advance or alternative, and fantasy based on magic.  I am sure I have read other stories based on a different legal road, but just can't think of one offhand.  So this story is worth reading just for that reason.

Also, it's a good story, told in a straight-out way from a believable feminist perspective.  The protagonist probably thinks of herself as post-feminist, but that's OK.  What if, at some point, society decides that the best person to raise a child is whoever the child is most attached to, not necessarily a biological parent?  Caregivers could win children away.  And testing the laws could be lucrative for lawyers.

This story is a Nebula award nominee for 2012.  Will it win?  Most likely not--but it's a pretty good try, and a good story to say that an alternate legal history is a valid jumping off point for speculative fiction.  4 stars for originality.