Cinder House by Freya Marske
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bisexual MC, listing other rep would be spoilers
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
ISBN: 1250341728
Goodreads

Sparks fly and lovers dance in this gorgeous, yearning Cinderella retelling from bestselling author Freya Marske —a queer Gothic romance perfect for fans of Naomi Novik and T. Kingfisher.

Ella is a haunting.

Murdered at sixteen, her ghost is furiously trapped in her father's house, invisible to everyone except her stepmother and stepsisters.

Even when she discovers how to untether herself from her prison, there are limits. She cannot be seen or heard by the living people who surround her. Her family must never learn she is able to leave. And at the stroke of every midnight, she finds herself back on the staircase where she died.

Until she forges a wary friendship with a fairy charm-seller, and makes a bargain for three nights of almost-living freedom. Freedom that means she can finally be seen. Danced with. Touched.

You think you know Ella's the ball, the magical shoes, the handsome prince.

You're halfway right, and all-the-way wrong.

Rediscover a classic fairy tale in this debut novella from "the queen of romantic fantasy" (Polygon).

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As someone who has no strong feelings about Cinderella as a fairytale, I LOVE how original and unexpected Marske managed to make this retelling, while still keeping it very recognisable as a retelling!

Cinderella-as-ghost is definitely not a take I’ve seen before, but Marske’s take on ghost-hood is genuinely cool. Ella is the house she haunts; if someone breaks a window, it hurts her (this is how her stepfamily gets her to serve them) and when she feels emotions, she doesn’t experience them like we do (because as a spirit she has no endocrine system, or body parts to be governed by an endocrine system, for that matter): instead, she feels them with her floorboards, her copper pipes, her rooftiles. Arousal and sex are very different for a ghost-as-house, and it was hilarious to read things like walking on a carpet framed as erotica.

But the moments of hilarity are very few: Ella’s situation is enraging and heartbreaking, and I wanted to whoop when she discovered a way to leave the house for a while, and started finding some joys in her afterlife. The fairy charm-seller mentioned in the blurb was a delight throughout, and Ella’s visits to the theatre, especially the ballet, where just…you could feel the genuine passion Ella had, for the artform, for the dance troupe, for the other regular attendees in the audience. It was such a human thing, a real-person thing; it made her immensely more real to me – and, I think, to herself, which is a big part of the story: Ella finding a way to be a person again after years of miserable stasis.

In the author’s note at the end, Marske talks about this being a book about disability and chronic illness, and I feel like SUCH A MORON for not putting that together while I was reading! I’ve literally spent the years since Covid appeared in strict isolation, barely leaving the house – and that’s exactly the situation Marske was drawing on, was recreating and reinterpreting via Ella’s connection/binding to the house. Talk about a galaxy-brain moment – looking back on the story with that in mind, I had to give it an extra half-star, because that’s genius, and so well done (it’s not Marske’s fault I’m too dumb to get it until it was pointed out, okay?) Ella’s finding-a-way-to-be-a-person-again journey, for example, hits very differently in that context; her limited awareness of the outer world, her invisibility and isolation, the passions she develops (like the ballet) but can’t share with anyone – that’s exactly what it’s like, being housebound, and/or being in public as a visibly disabled person. Even the sort-of friendship Ella manages to create with a pen pal echoes the online friendships that are sometimes all people like me can have. Or the muted ‘strangeness’ of Ella’s sexuality, her inability to have what for ease of conversation I’ll call ‘normal’ sex – yeah, that’s definitely a thing within disabled spaces. Your desires being considered alien, or at least very weird; the accommodations, experiments, and hoops you have to jump through to have sex with a disabled body. I can even see Ella’s inability to touch people as an exaggerated version of my own fibro, which can often mean that touching other people hurts, making it impossible.

I have a lot of Feels about this, clearly.

There was also – I found this a little frustrating at times (see: I am very dumb and apparently need quite a lot spelled out for me) but even so, I really appreciated how much Marske showed us without telling us. A number of things are very quietly presented to us as puzzle pieces, and Marske makes no attempt to obfuscate them or anything, but she does leave it up to us to put the pieces together. (See: the secret in the attic.) This is something I haven’t seen a lot of recently, and I liked it even when it left me a little confused. (Genuinely wanted to head-desk after I figured out the attic thing. WHY SO SLOW, SIA?) I think it helped balance the built-in constraints of a novella format – on the one hand, novellas often feel a little rushed, and I thought this one did, but Marske’s minimal telling helped offset that. And that combination is DEFINITELY something I haven’t seen in a while.

Kind of related – I noticed this in Swordspoint, and Marske does it again in Cinder House, carefully designing and placing small details of worldbuilding with the precision of a jeweller, details that are not especially strange but anchor the story (and setting) powerfully. For example: only Ella’s stepmother and -sisters can see her, because they own the house she is part of. Only those with a claim to the property can see ghosts attached to it. That is a) objectively interesting and b) absolutely fascinating when we consider that this is not objective reality. Ella’s father died, leaving the house to her in his will (presumably why the stepmother had to murder them both, not just her husband); Ella died a few minutes later. So if the magic only cared about objective reality, the stepmother does not own the house, because she was not Ella’s heir. But the stepmother lies, says Ella died first, which would mean that the stepmother inherits as the father’s spouse. But that’s not objectively true, it’s only true in the eyes of (fallible) human law – and yet the magic follows, is defined by, human law. Is this a mindblowingly unique concept? I guess not, but it doesn’t have to be: it still gives the story heft, adds a level of – realism seems like the wrong word, but I’m not sure what word would be better. Believability? Authenticity? Something like that.

And there are a fair few other details of the story/worldbuilding that are like that, but I won’t spoil them for you!

I did wish Cinder House was longer – probably not a full novel, but a bit longer than it is. I’d have liked to have seen excerpts from the letters, for example, to help develop that relationship in my mind, and I wish we could’ve gotten a little more time with Princess Nadya (who, for the record, RULES)(unintended pun but I’m keeping it). And I thought the stretch of time we had before Ella learned to leave the house felt rushed – but then, I’m not sure how that could have been avoided: there simply wasn’t much story to tell there. I wish Marske had done more with the feeling-with-parts-of-the-house thing; most of the time it felt like a superficial detail, and I thought it could have been done better with a little more poetry in the descriptions of it.

But! I’ll wrap this up by saying that I freaking LOVED the romance, both as an endgame [View post to see spoiler] and in the very unusual choice Princess Nadya made regarding her for-politics marriage. [View post to see spoiler]

This is just – a lot of really neat, unusual choices and thoughts and ideas pretending to be a familiar story; pretending so well that its familiarity feels warm and soft and oddly comforting. At a glance, Cinder House isn’t too weird; but when you start looking at all the little details in there, and considering them, Marske’s genius becomes very obvious. (Even without the disability metaphor/rep.) I enjoyed it more than I loved it – some of my rating is for technical appreciation for Marske’s craft, rather than for love of what she did with it – but I know I’ll be thinking about this one for a long while yet.

The post A Metaphor That Hit Me Hard: Cinder House by Freya Marske appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.