Well, Rosamund Hodge easily became one of my favorite authors. 
 Gilded Ashes is a story about love and sacrifice and reason, and how too much love can choke a person and make them just as unhappy as the absence of love. 
 <<Ghosts are laid to rest when injustices are righted, when their duties are fulfilled. But my mother's duty is to make me happy as long as I live. So there is no rest for her, and no escape for me. I will be happy and happy until it kills me.>> 
 It is a story of truth and lies and being yourself. How often do people have to filter what they say? How many times do they have to hide their true selves in order to be accepted and "understood" by others? How many people are there who truly, really know who you are? 
 <<My smiles and my silent submission both feel like a heavy porcelain mask; my face is always tugging against them, trying to take another expression. Trying to speak the truth.>> 
 And this is also a story about reckless decisions and good intentions and how they often pave the road to hell. 
 <<My mother knew that wishes are always bought with pain. She thought she could shield me from the price, but she was wrong. Maybe I could do better. Maybe I could word my bargain carefully enough that nobody I loved would pay. But somebody would. And I know one thing my mother never did. I know what it is like to live every day and every hour by the fruits of someone else's wretched bargain. To see people suffer and know, They suffer because I am loved.>> 
 This unique and rather dark Cinderella retelling takes place in the Cruel Beauty universe and boy, do people of Arcadia love their bargains with the Gentle Lord! One would think that they would learn something from each other's mistakes, but there is always someone willing to take the risk. 
 All the characters are unbelievably messed up and everyone is hiding something from everyone else, trying to pretend to be what they are not. 
 I adore this author's writing. It is clever, insightful and very lyrical and beautiful at places. 
 <<Their attention crawls over my back and shoulders, ice-cold and multitudinous, like the feet of a thousand rats, like dribbles from an ocean of alien hatred. Suddenly I imagine--suddenly I know--that beyond the parchment dome of the sky waits an abyss of demons, and my body shakes as I wonder if the sky will tear like wet paper and let them flow through.>> 
 I mean, who else ever described demons as "dribbles from an ocean of alien hatred"? 
 My personal impression about the writing is that it borders on satire. Not in the "humor" sense, but more like everything is a bit too grotesque to be read as a regular story, but also diluted enough so that it can't be called a full-fledged satire either. This is a spectacle unfolding before your eyes, with characters that are a perfect mix of cartoonish and realistic, and so are their actions. Everything is exaggerated to make a better point, maybe even more here than in Cruel Beauty. 
 I will gladly read more retellings from Rosamund Hodge, as well as independent stories. I saw she has plans for both.