Cinder House by Freya Marske Narrator: Anna Burnett
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, fantasy romance
Pages: 144
Length: 4 hours and 34 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tordotcom on October 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
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 story: 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).
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
My Review:
Just as the blurb says, you think you know this story. If you’ve ever read Marissa Meyer’s Cinder, or Alix E. Harrow’s Fractured Fables duology (A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended) you may think you have a handle on all the variations on this story as well.
We’ve all grown up on it, after all, thanks to Disney. The wicked stepsisters, the drudge who wants to go to the ball, the fairy godmother (or mothers), the prince, the shoes. And all those elements are here in Cinder House.
And so is Ella. Or, at least, in this case, the ghost of Ella, trapped in the house where she was murdered, still serving as the drudge of all work for her murderous stepmother and her stepsisters, one evil and one just as trapped in her own way as Ella is in hers.
Ella’s stepmother may be the one who killed her, but it’s the house itself that has trapped her. Because the house is sentient. It can’t speak, not exactly, but it still needs a way to express its grief and its anger, and it needs a vessel to hold its grudges. Ella is its hands, its voice, and its only possibility for revenge.
All it has to do is watch and wait and let Ella’s suffering fester within its walls, driving her towards revenge for them both. Unless, with the help of a literal fairy godmother, Ella can find a way out from under both her family and her family’s house that no one ever imagined.
Escape Rating B+: I picked this up because this was the only novella among this year’s Hugo nominees that I hadn’t read. I remember checking it out multiple times and then skipping over it, probably because I did think I knew the story. In the end, well, I LOVED the end. That was perfect. And all the stuff about Ella being a ghost and the way that worked was a new and different way of handling Ella’s situation and just the way that ghostliness worked overall was well done.
I think my mixed feelings are in just how much of the early part of the story was taken up in detailing, not Ella’s ghostly situation because that was fascinating, but her continuing abuse at the hands of one of her stepsisters who was both a sorceress AND a psychopath. Not that all of that didn’t need to be established, not that it wasn’t important to the story, but there was a lot of “oh woe is me” that was just more than I wanted no matter how justified it was. And it was.
How Ella’s ghostliness worked was fascinating, and new and different. But her stepsisters’ treatment of her was old and sad and a bit overdone for my personal taste. As is often the case for me, when I listen to a book, as I did with Cinder House, when the narrator is good, as Anna Burnett certainly was, I find myself feeling a bit too much for the character’s personal travails because I’m too much inside their head. Which makes the listening experience simultaneously excellent and uncomfortable.
Howsomever, as I said, the ending of this was terrific AND terrifically unexpected in the way that it worked out. And not just because a happy ending in a romance between a ghost and a living human is a bit of a puzzle to arrange. The unconventionality of the arrangement between the Prince, his political bride, his ghost and her two best friends was a surprise and a delight. I wasn’t expecting the way it worked out AT ALL but I was very happy that it did – if not quite as happy as they were!
