Alix Harrow is a writer whose work has shown the power of story, I’ve read both of her novels (The Ten Thousand Doors of January and The Once and Future Witches) and that love of story and respect for story are what shines through as a common thread between those two novels. Harrow turns her focus to a shorter, though no less potent tale, with A Spindle Splintered, which launches a new series she calls Fractured Fables. Here the “Sleeping Beauty” story is front and center as the Fable she examines and honors.
It’s Zinnia Gray’s twenty-first birthday, which is extra-special because it’s the last birthday she’ll ever have. When she was young, an industrial accident left Zinnia with a rare condition. Not much is known about her illness, just that no-one has lived past twenty-one.
Her best friend Charm is intent on making Zinnia’s last birthday special with a full sleeping beauty experience, complete with a tower and a spinning wheel. But when Zinnia pricks her finger, something strange and unexpected happens, and she finds herself falling through worlds, with another sleeping beauty, just as desperate to escape her fate.
Young Zinnia Gray is afflicted with a condition that won’t see her live long past her 21st birthday, which she is “celebrating” at the opening of this novel. Zinna is a student of story, having studied the classics of world literature, with a special attention and affection for “Sleeping Beauty.” She sees herself as something of a reflection of that age old tale. Zinnia’s best friend Charmaine, Charm for short, does everything possible to keep Zinna’s spirits up including setting up a birthday party for Zinna in what amounts to a castle. Zinna pricks herself on a needle and finds herself in a real castle, inhabited by Primrose, a young woman equally stuck in a situation she wishes to escape…her father has protected her from all manner of magic so she wouldn’t be drawn into a year’s long sleep and is expected to marry a prince.
Zinnia decides if she can’t heal herself and lift her own “curse,” she can at least help Primrose escape her unwanted fate. So, the two sisters from another universe set out to find the fairy who cursed Primrose. Things don’t go as the expect.
I thoroughly enjoy stories like this one… stories where there are alternate characters, twisted takes on well-known stories, parallel universes, and the like. I suppose my lifetime of reading superhero comic books is part of the reason. Harrow herself references Into the Spider-Verse in describing the story. Bottom line, this is a story that has fun with stories, examines them in a smart and entertaining way and tries to “fix” them with modern sensibilities, particularly how chauvinistic something like “Sleeping Beauty” is, injecting a wonderful queer romance, and making her disabled heroine outside the mold of a fairy-tale hero. Harrow also does a nice job of imparting the theme of upending expectations and long-held assumptions especially around the “Maleficent” to Primrose’s “Sleeping Beauty.”
A Spindle Splintered is a perfect start to a series, one which Harrow has called Fractured Fables. That also calls to mind the great early 2000s comic series Fables. Zinnia is an absolute delight as a narrator / protagonist and it is impossible not to be in her corner from the first word of the story to the closing page of this short novel/novella.
I for one am looking forward to Zinnia’s next Fractured Fable, A Mirror Mended.
© 2021 Rob H. Bedford
Published by Tor.com | October 2021
https://alixeharrow.wixsite.com/author
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
