Cinder House
Freya Marske
Cinderella as a ghost
Here are the finalists for the 2026 Best Novella Hugo Award.
★★★☆☆ Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
★★★★☆ Cinder House by Freya Marske
★★★☆☆ Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
★★★☆☆ The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
★★★☆☆ The Summer War by Naomi Novik
★★★★☆ What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher
Ding! Ding! Ding! Folks, we have a winner!
Freya Marske's Cinder House is a Cinderella retelling. Ella is more a Disney Cinderella than Grimms Aschenputtel. But she is something quite original. In this retelling Ella is dead, a ghost haunting the house in which her stepmother and stepsisters live. In Marske's version of haunting (at least in this story), the haunt is tied to the building being haunted. Thus the title Cinder House. One consequence is that Ella can't leave the confines of the house. The only people who can see her are the inhabitants of that house, meaning Ella's stepmother and stepsisters, who are -- surprise, surprise -- not kind.
Ella wants nothing more than to escape the house. As well as ghosts, there are fairies and sorcerers in this world. Ella manages to contact some of these magical people. The story follows somewhat familiar lines -- the ball, the glass slippers, the prince. If you have read other works of Marske's, you will not be surprised to hear that there are spicy ("explicitly sexual") bits. I have reached the age where descriptions of moist bits rubbing against other moist bits just bore me -- could we please get back to the story? -- but they were not excessive here.
Cinder House easily wins my nomination for 2026 Best Novella. The crop this year was lackluster -- even Kingfisher's What Stalks the Deep disappointed me a bit. Cinder House did not disappoint. This was a good book, and I'm glad the Hugo awards led me to it.
And now, on to the novelettes!
Excellent review! 💯
The idea of having a Cinderella story where she’s a ghost is very clever, and I’m glad that this book did a good job of doing great storytelling with that idea! 👻