How does a house, lacking flesh, feel fury?
I went into Freya Marske’s novella completely cold, and I thought maybe this was going to be a humorous retelling of Cinderella. Ha ha, a poor house that has to slave away for its evil stepmother and two evil stepsisters, how droll. Nope. This particular retelling is epic, and very, very dark right out of the gate. Everyone knows that in the original fairy tale Cinderella is left with her new evil family when her mother and father die. In this version there’s a third fatality that changes everything.
The story begins with sixteen-year-old Ella’s death, partly by accident but mostly by murder. In Marske’s magical kingdom, houses are alive, or at the very least are somewhat conscious. When Ella is poisoned in the first paragraph and dead by the third, the house’s only way to make up for failing to keep its family safe was to keep Ella’s ghost in the house. To make her part of the house. Ella can feel every brick, every carpet, every porcelain plate. And Ella’s curse to be an obedient house, added to her ingrained-since-birth urge to keep everything tidy, means that once her stepmother and stepsisters recover from the shock of seeing their murder victim walking around, Ella has to obey all their orders.
Or else.
Being intangible means Ella can’t be hurt directly, but unfortunately she can feel everything that’s done to the house. And at least one of her stepsisters takes real delight in proving that. Repeatedly. There are parts of this book that are absolutely harrowing, the description of what a handheld jigsaw against a smashed window frame feels like alone… Worse than the torture and being enslaved to her murderers is the fact that Ella will now be sixteen forever. Trapped in the moment when she was just starting to wish for more, to start imagining other places, meeting other people, being, ahem, with other people. Men. Women. Anyone who isn’t her stepmother and stepsisters, who remain the only people who can actually see Ella.
Clandestine purchases of romance adventure novels are the only way for Ella to comfort herself, until she accidentally discovers a way that she can leave the house. Only at night, and only for a few hours, and she’s still invisible to everyone. But these are the parts where Marske’s writing really shines because Ella is an intangible knot of yearning in the shape of a sixteen-year-old’s ghost, and she takes every chance she can to feast her eyes on all the marvelous scenes available to someone who can walk through walls.
One bold night she followed some gilded carriages beneath the archway of a house so large it was almost a palace, and found herself at a masquerade in a private garden. Lanterns illuminated gowns sewn with seed-pearls and glass beads, and men who’s coats sang with metallic braid, and mask after mask after mask: leather and brocade and silk, feathers and shells, monkeys and peacocks and sea-queens and cats and twisted, compelling imps.
It would have taken Ella’s breath if she had any.
An accidental friendship with a fairy shopkeeper (you knew there was going to be a fairy) and the announcement of a three-day royal ball (you knew there was going to be a ball) gives Ella the chance to barter for a magic spell and a pair of shoes covered with shards of mirror in order to be real and visible to everyone and be able to taste and touch and, in a moment that delights them both, actually meet the charming prince of the realm.
And nothing goes the way you expect it to. Ella’s three-day experiment with being alive again quickly leads to a desire to stay, with all the complications that come with it.
She glimpsed the beginning of a slope even more dangerous than that between ghost and haunting; that having tasted the life that came with the shoes, she would do anything for more.
Marske makes a lot of surprising choices in this story. There are references to Ella’s history that made me think “Wait, what was that again?” which are then never really explained, as if Ella herself decided she has too much going on to think about past trauma. The notion of fairy gifts and fairy curses leads to a shocking backstory, which feels like it takes a moment to really hit since it’s all told with the author’s understated, “this is how it all happened” tone (the story-within-a-story, or the-story-before-the-story, which are always some of my favorite parts of a book.) Almost as shocking are the frankly sexual moments, with the tasty element of sexual repression finally being cast aside, and at least one shockingly steamy incident involving bondage.
It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that there is a happily-ever-after here, because it’s not one I was able to predict. It’s cinematic in places, and almost too perfect in the most whimsically weirdest way possible.