Review: Cinder House
3/5 stars
Cinder House, by Freya Marske (2025)
Oh, so close to being a 4 or maybe even a 5-star rating, but - the ending! Ugh. Still, I'm giving it a good rating because I really loved the rest of it.
As reimagined fairy tales go, this was pretty creative. Ella and her father are murdered by the evil stepmother so she can live in the father's big, beautiful house with the two evil step sisters. But something goes awry for Ella, and instead of being dead-and-gone, she's become a ghost that haunts the house, and also in some ways IS the house. She is tethered to it and feels when things are going wrong - a loose tile on the roof flies away in a strong wind, or one of her nasty step sisters sets fire to something.
The only people that can see her are the house's owners, so, the stepmother and step sisters. They take full advantage of her, just as they did when she was alive. Sure, she could say no to their demands, but because of her physical connection to the house itself, whenever things are messy she is compelled to tidy them up.
She begins to test the limits of her haunting, and learns how to travel into the city - while the stepmother and sisters are sleeping - where she meets a a fairy who makes her a bargain. She will be able to attend the Prince's ball for three nights in a row in a fully corporeal body. But at the stroke of midnight she will return to the house and be a ghost once more.
At the ball, Ella meets the Prince, who is himself under a fairy's curse which he must hide from the world, and they, of course, fall for each other. There is a magical pair of shoes that the women of the city must try on in an effort to find Ella once she's disappeared back to the house. And you probably think you know the ending, but you don't...
SPOILERS:
Because the Prince gets married to someone else - a Princess from another land - and they basically include her in their relationship in a weird throuple kind of way where Ella can't actually touch anyone but they like for her to watch them have sex?! It was the weirdest, dumbest ending. And the more I think about it the more I want to give this book 2 stars because of it. But I really did think it was very creative and unique to the genre.
I'll end with a joke my dad used to tell...
There once was a girl named Ella. They made her clean out the cinders in the fireplace, so they called her CINDERella. It's a good thing she wasn't born in Italy, or they would've called her MOZZARella.
UP NEXT: Hemlock & Silver, by T. Kingfisher
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