A Spindle Splintered
The Fractured Fables series, Book 1
Alix E. Harrow
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Since the day she was born, Zinnia Gray has been living on borrowed time thanks to chemical pollution's impact on her mother's pregnancy. Despite all the doctors and lawyers and drugs and treatments, her twenty-first birthday is more than likely to be her last, the protein buildup in her organs approaching terminal levels. Her best friend Charm had decided that Zinnia will go out with the best birthday party ever. In an old abandoned tower (once a prison watchtower), she throws a Sleeping Beauty-themed bash, complete with an authentic spinning wheel; Zinnia always related to the princess who lived her whole life under an unavoidable curse, and even got a degree studying fairy tales to understand its roots. It was on a lark that, at midnight, she deliberately pricked herself on the spindle... and found herself whisked away, to another tower and another wheel, where another princess is about to make her own fateful mistake.
Princess Primrose has lived with a fairy curse since her christening, and was about to fulfill it when Zinnia turned up and stopped her. Now, she can marry the prince and have a happily-ever-after... but the prince looks more arrogant and conniving than handsome, and Primrose doesn't seem happy at all - and not just because she still feels the curse pulling her toward the tower and the spindle and one hundred years of enchanted slumber. Zinnia, however, has had enough of fatalism. Surely, in this world of wishes and magic and fairies, she can find a way to avoid her own death sentence, and help Primrose avoid hers. But Zinnia, of all people, should know that it's never that simple to thwart fate - and many versions of the Sleeping Beauty tale are not about princesses getting happily-ever-after endings, but princesses finding tragedy and death.
REVIEW: Talk about a turnaround from yesterday's book, Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars. From a story where women are weak and almost inhuman entities whose only desire is to belong to a man, it's a long way forward and up to A Spindle Splintered, which is all about women taking back their power and autonomy.
Zinnia's entire life has been lived under the cloud of her impending death, and though she's told herself time and again that she is ready, that she has done all she possibly could and has accepted her fate - has even lived her life by a set of rules she came up with for dying people, to prevent her getting too invested in her very brief stay on Earth - the moment she has even the vaguest, wildest chance at more time or a cure, she hardly wastes a moment before chasing it. At first, she sees the princess Primrose as a fragile victim, a fairy tale figure in a fairy tale world that defies everything she knows about logic and reality and yet persists in existing (in a strange sort of quantum reality where Zinnia still gets cell service, and can briefly text her panicking friend Charm back in Ohio), but as the tale goes on it becomes clear that there's more to her than is initially apparent, and they have more in common than Zinnia first realized. Determined to lift the curse, they set out to find the wicked fairy responsible, but what they learn turns everything they thought they knew on its ear. Throughout the story, under Zinnia's snarky modern voice and the increasingly dark overtones of the fairy tale world she's plunged into, is a theme of feminism, how women are stripped of choices and that very stripping is romanticized and glamourized until even the women come to embrace it (most of them, at least)... and how those who resist are vilified and punished. The harder Zinnia and Primrose try to forge their own happy endings, the more the worlds push back, but Zinnia's not about to give up, not when she literally has nothing to lose.
From the start, the voice pulled me in, and the tale kept moving until almost the very end, which seemed a little drawn out. The whole makes for an enjoyable and thought-provoking examination of a classic story whose roots are far darker than many want to realize.
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