Cruel Truth

Twisted Tales Series

Author: Jen Calonita

Book 20 in the Twisted Tales series

Pages: 372

Published: 2025

Age: 12+

What if Anita and Cruella were best friends?

It’s 1953, and teenage Anita Weatherby and her family have just moved to a booming postwar London. While her older sister settles right in, to the delight of their parents, Anita finds their new school—and her academic rival, Roger Radcliffe—daunting. Nothing seems to be going Anita’s way until a glamorous, confident new student moves to town. Stella De Vil is haughty and aloof—but surprises everyone by taking an immediate liking to Anita.

Swept into the luxurious world of Stella’s highend family fashion label, Anita soon finds herself the anticipated star of the House of De Vil’s next fashion show, where she’ll be modelling a family heirloom, the Weatherby diamond, and walking the catwalk with two adorable Dalmatian puppies to raise awareness for a local animal shelter.

But when disaster strikes and the Weatherby diamond goes missing, Anita will have to decide whom she can trust before her life goes to the dogs.

About the Twisted Tales Series

Reading age: 12+ years

Welcome to a new YA series that reimagines classic Disney stories in surprising new ways. Each book asks the question: What if one key moment from a familiar Disney film was changed? These dark and daring versions of classic fairytales offer a simple twist: What if someone other than Aladdin found the genie's magic lamp? Or what if the sleeping beauty never woke up? What is Belle's mother was actually the one to curse the beast? What happens next? Readers will never again look at these stories in quite the same way...