A Mirror Mended
The Fractured Fables series, Book 2
Alix E. Harrow
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Five years ago, Zinnia Gray was dying when her best friend, Charmaine, threw her a fairy tale themed birthday party, centered on Zinnia's favorite story, Sleeping Beauty. Pricking her finger on the spindle, Zinnia fell into a swoon... and into a story, following a call for help from a princess under a very familiar curse. Since then, Zinnia's bounced around the multiverse of stories, saving other princesses (and princes, and more) and arranging more happily-ever-afters - for everyone but herself. Every time she returns to Earth, the disease that was going to kill her recurs, a reminder that no matter how many fairy tales she fixes, her own last page is still waiting for her, and it's anything but happy.
Then Zinnia sees a face in the mirror, another call for help from across the multiverse of tales. Only there is no magic mirror in any iteration of the Sleeping Beauty story (as she should know, having a degree in fairy tale studies and more than enough practical experience living it time and again in its many iterations). But there is one in Snow White - and it belongs to the Evil Queen.
The Evil Queen who has just asked for help to escape her own terrible ending.
On the one hand, Zinnia's not in the habit of helping out villains. On the other, she may not have a choice if she ever wants to see her real home and real family and friends again... even if it means she'll have to confront the very thing she herself has been avoiding for five years, the final pages of her own life.
REVIEW: Like the first installment of the series, A Mirror Mended opens fast with plenty of action, spunk, and heart, as well as plenty of darkness and doom just beneath the surface. Zinnia convinces herself the multiverse needs her more than mundane Earth, but at what point does selfless heroism become selfish avoidance, and when does interfering in other people's stories and worlds do more harm than good? Already she's lost her best friend over her constant world-hopping, which she uses to avoid difficult conversations and hard realities. The Evil Queen starts out every inch the cold, menacing witch every reader is familiar with, willing to go to any length to save her own skin from the dark ending she brought upon herself... but, as always, there's more to her story than was written. Hard as Zinnia tries to condemn her and leave her to her fate, much as she tries to tell herself that the woman's just plain evil and evil people always deserve their gruesome endings, she can't help listening, especially when the Queen's plight strikes too close to home. When she learns that her world-hopping has been having unintended consequences, she finally has to look herself in the mirror and ask what she's becoming, what kind of story she's writing for her own life - and if, rather than being the selfless and blameless heroine of dozens of fairy tales, she has more in common with the queen than she wants to admit. As in the first story, Zinnia wrestles with an unfair hand dealt by an unfair life and her own looming mortality, even as she delves into the deeper symbolism and darkness of familiar (and often watered-down) stories that reveal so much about the societies that tell them. It wavers a bit at first, as Zinnia leans hard into her self-assigned role as the innocent protagonist out to right wrongs and give other people the happy endings she knows she'll never have herself, but once the story digs into the Evil Queen's struggle it rises easily to the level of the first story. Also like the first one, the ending's not the simple sweetness-and-sunshine fairy tale conclusion some might have offered, but a perfect and bittersweet finale. Especially given my iffy reading luck this month, I enjoyed it all the more.
You Might Also Enjoy:
A Spindle Splintered (Alix E. Harrow) - My Review
How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse (K. Eason) - My Review
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles (Patricia C. Wrede) - My Review
No comments:
Post a Comment