A Spindle Splintered
By: Alix E. Harrow
Published Year: 2021
Publisher: Tordotcom
Pages: 128
Summary (Provided by Goodreads): 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.
First Impressions
My coworker is a huge Harrow fan and was the one who encouraged me to read Ten Thousand Doors of January. I have her second book on my list and didn’t know this one exhisted. When my worker read it and rated it 5 stars, I added it to me list, saw it was under 200 pages long, and she loaned it to me immediately. Also, how beautiful is this cover??
What I thought
Sleeping Beauty is not my favorite fairy tale. I am definitely a Beauty and the Beast kind of girl. I was intrigued by the idea of a short modern day re-telling that involves being sucked into the story.
Since this book is so short, I don’t want to say too much about the actual content, but instead I’ll share about how it made me feel. The writing was just as vivid as Harrow’s debut. I was sucked into the world just as Zinnea was sucked into the magic kingdom.
My coworker had mentioned how good Harrow is at researching the topics she writes about and you could see that clearly in this novel. There was so much history and insight into the lore of Sleeping Beauty that I never knew about before.
As a short story, you need to get drawn in immediately since there’s no time to spare. This was accomplished so well and it held my attention the entire time. I was rooting for our protagonists and wasn’t able to predict exactly how the characters would get to where they needed to.
This is a very well written short story and even though I’m not a Sleeping Beauty fan I was immediately drawn in and it kept my attention from beginning to end. If you’ve never read Harrow’s other books, I just know this one will give you your first taste and you will add her others to your list. Her writing style is magical and I am looking forward to the next book in this series. I hope that she ends up tackling all of the fairy tales!