Review: Cinder House, by Freya Marske

 

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 story: the ball, the magical shoes, the handsome prince. You're halfway right, and all-the-way wrong. 

"Some angers, you can never get rid of." 

Freya Marske's Cinder House is a lush Cinderella retelling with a twist. We follow the ghost of Ella as she becomes one with the house she lived and died in, tests the boundaries of her haunting, and reckons with the abuse bestowed upon her by her stepmother and stepsisters. The short format makes for a compact novella, where every word has weight. The unusual premise allows the author to write some very interesting turns of phrase, penning the language of Ella's awakening queer desire with references to her being not only a person, but a house too. Every part of the house can manifest her feelings, and it reads oddly at first, but then it works perfectly. 

Ella is angry, but she hungers too. It really is a perfect methaphor, and Marske explores it deftly. As Ella manages to marginally escape the constraints of the house, so begins her exploration of the city and herself. She looks at men and women both, and finds academic satisfaction in a pen friend who answers all her questions about ghosts. At the same time, she sates her hunger by watching ballet after ballet and enjoying both the performances and the attendants. Things come to a head, and all her worlds crash, when the Prince calls for a ball.

Marske combines what we know of the story with a new take and the exploration of the beginnings of an unconventional polyamorous relationship, working under the constraints of terrible magic. It is a queer tale, but not pretty or easy; it pushes boundaries, and it isn't interested in holding anyone's hand.

Cinder House is a profoundly creative novella.

✨ 4 stars