I grew up devouring YA urban fantasy series and now that I'm an adult I've really been lacking those stories. I was really hoping that this would hit for me but alas it did not. This wasn't bad by any means, but just bland. For this book to succeed I needed to be invested in the found family but I didn't have a connection with any of the characters. What we really needed were multiple POVs so that we could get a little snippet of each character, the Shadowhunter books do this quite well. I also did not feel the romance and it came out of left field. We needed more flirty vibes and way more of Astoria so that we could understand what the deal with her character was. I might give book two a chance if I'm in the mood for it.

Thanks to the publisher for providing me with an audio-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

As someone who has no strong feelings about Cinderella as a fairytale, I LOVE how original and unexpected Marske managed to make this retelling, while still keeping it very recognisable as a retelling!

Cinderella-as-ghost is definitely not a take I’ve seen before, but Marske’s take on ghost-hood is genuinely cool. Ella is the house she haunts; if someone breaks a window, it hurts her (this is how her stepfamily gets her to serve them) and when she feels emotions, she doesn’t experience them like we do (because as a spirit she has no endocrine system, or body parts to be governed by an endocrine system, for that matter): instead, she feels them with her floorboards, her copper pipes, her rooftiles. Arousal and sex are very different for a ghost-as-house, and it was hilarious to read things like walking on a carpet framed as erotica.

But the moments of hilarity are very few: Ella’s situation is enraging and heartbreaking, and I wanted to whoop when she discovered a way to leave the house for a while, and started finding some joys in her afterlife. The fairy charm-seller mentioned in the blurb was a delight throughout, and Ella’s visits to the theatre, especially the ballet, where just…you could feel the genuine passion Ella had, for the artform, for the dance troupe, for the other regular attendees in the audience. It was such a human thing, a real-person thing; it made her immensely more real to me – and, I think, to herself, which is a big part of the story: Ella finding a way to be a person again after years of miserable stasis.

In the author’s note at the end, Marske talks about this being a book about disability and chronic illness, and I feel like SUCH A MORON for not putting that together while I was reading! I’ve literally spent the years since Covid appeared in strict isolation, barely leaving the house – and that’s exactly the situation Marske was drawing on, was recreating and reinterpreting via Ella’s connection/binding to the house. Talk about a galaxy-brain moment – looking back on the story with that in mind, I had to give it an extra half-star, because that’s genius, and so well done (it’s not Marske’s fault I’m too dumb to get it until it was pointed out, okay?) Ella’s finding-a-way-to-be-a-person-again journey, for example, hits very differently in that context; her limited awareness of the outer world, her invisibility and isolation, the passions she develops (like the ballet) but can’t share with anyone – that’s exactly what it’s like, being housebound, and/or being in public as a visibly disabled person. Even the sort-of friendship Ella manages to create with a pen pal echoes the online friendships that are sometimes all people like me can have. Or the muted ‘strangeness’ of Ella’s sexuality, her inability to have what for ease of conversation I’ll call ‘normal’ sex – yeah, that’s definitely a thing within disabled spaces. Your desires being considered alien, or at least very weird; the accommodations, experiments, and hoops you have to jump through to have sex with a disabled body. I can even see Ella’s inability to touch people as an exaggerated version of my own fibro, which can often mean that touching other people hurts, making it impossible.

I have a lot of Feels about this, clearly.

Link