hi blink!! saw that you read cinder house when i went to go mark it as read - would love to hear your thoughts if you have any to share, i absolutely adore what it has going on with what it means to haunt a house
atti!! hello! (and sorry for the literal months of not seeing this!!) first I’ll start out by saying i really enjoyed cinder house - but i’m also a big fan of pretty much everything freya marske has put out, so that was unsurprising to me. it wasn’t a favorite of mine, because frankly it would be hard to beat the power unbound trilogy, but I thought it was a pretty interesting approach to retelling a fairytale.
overall my biggest issue was the pacing. which isn’t a fault, but a feature, because it’s a novella and everything is meant to move along quickly. i’m just not often a novella guy! i like to sit in things for a while. (that’s a me problem, i’m effectively going to Home Depot and asking for a milkshake.)
BUT !!
i fuckin love a ghost story with rules. i think one of the areas where you have the most room to improvise and create your own lore in a supernatural / haunting type story is deciding how the ghosts work, what the limitations are, and how they can be broken. this was VERY good at making all of that seem logical. carry a piece of the house with you, and the house is now wherever you are. chef’s kiss. it’s so easy to just dismiss it as “oh it’s a ghost story, who cares how it works!” but this book didn’t do that, and i liked that about it.
beyond just the “carry the house with you,” everything about the ways in which the family could manipulate a ghost by way of damaging the vessel (house) was great. genuinely very spooky and creepy. I was wondering about this, because generally in a ghost story the ghost is the one with the power to scare and intimidate the living and I wasn’t sure how that would translate to the “evil step sisters” dynamic. but the explanation and methodology made it very believable and very scary! quite well done, all in all.
some of the other fiddly bits - the potion to become physically stable, the secondary death site to revive her, etc - were a little more hand wavey to me, but again, it’s a novella. not every magic system needs to be perfectly defined and figured out. the ghost stuff was, and that’s great.
the characterization was also pretty great! i wish we’d gotten more of the letter writing, tbh, because as is that final explanation of “oh we all actually know each other and get along and can be happy as a polyamorous supernatural trio!” felt a little too… neat? to me? and so much of it happened off screen that it was hard to buy into in the same way. but I’ll accept that as a matter of course / due to the specific fairytale being told, the relationship with the prince was prioritized and given more room to grow and develop.
i happened to have recently read a different Cinderella adaptation around the same time, actually, which primarily focused on pointing out the silliness (and also the necessity!) of certain aspects of the story - she HAS to be at the ball, the narrative demands it even if otherwise she couldn’t make it there, that kind of thing - so it was fun to come to this and see an honest genuine effort to provide explanations for how and why these things come to pass.
i did debate writing a fic for it, as i am wont to do, which typically indicates to me that i liked a thing and had fun with it. so! that’s good! overall i think I would have taken a much longer version of this book that dwelled a lot more on everything, but if that’s my only complaint, it’s a pretty solid work.
(also, i enjoy flipping through reviews of books on storygraph after finishing, and the number of people who didn’t figure out who the skeleton in the attic was ASTONISHED me. i felt like that was pretty clear! evidently not??? maybe i’m just making things up that the text doesn’t support. who can say.)












