CINDER HOUSE

In this ghostly fairy-tale retelling, a spectral Cinderella struggles to stay corporeal enough to make it to the ball.

Sixteen-year-old Ella is a ghost haunting her magical house as a grudge against her murderous stepmother and abusive stepsisters. Being more house than girl compels Ella to slavishly follow her family’s orders in a manner that calls back to Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted, with the added obstacle that she can’t pass beyond the house’s foundation. Despite her limited life experience, Ella is no naïf, inventively expanding her world through mail-order books and distant correspondence while surviving her stepsisters’ unique tortures. As the years pass and people move on, she even discovers a loophole for exploring the city and meeting new faces—like canny fairy Quaint, with whom she barters for an enchanted solution to attend the prince’s ball. The familiar story elements—dress, glass slippers, midnight curfew—are given new life and interpretations, but there is no simple spell to resurrect Ella. Instead, she must carve out new ways of existing in the world and making people see her on her terms. The flesh-and-blood characters are equally compelling: thoughtful revelations subvert the “doting father” and “wicked stepmother” archetypes, while the prince contends with a well-meaning fairy curse that reduces him to a dangerous object of desire. A setting in which both bisexuality and polyamory are woven into the social fabric means more alluring opportunities for Ella’s postmortem romance, which Marske accomplishes with her usual aplomb. Marske unflinchingly explores the ways limited mobility and accessibility can erode one’s sense of self, inspired by her own experiences of being housebound due to long Covid, and how to triumphantly cross those thresholds.

Cinderella finds her happily-ever-afterlife in this sharp addition to the fairy-tale canon.