Review: A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)

Title: A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)
Author: Alix E. Harrow
Genre: Fantasy, Novella, LGBTQ
Publisher: Tordotcom
Source: Purchased
Format: Hardcover
Release Date: October 5, 2021
Rating: ★★★★★

Goodreads Synopsis:

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.

USA Today bestselling author Alix E. Harrow’s A Spindle Splintered brings her patented charm to a new version of a classic story.

Review:

Zinnia Gray never expected to live past her twenty-first birthday. She has a rare medical condition, which destroys her organs. No one with her condition has ever lived to twenty-two. As a child, she became obsessed with Sleeping Beauty, who also had an expiry date on her life. Since it’s Zinnia’s last birthday, her best friend, Charm, throws her a Sleeping Beauty party, that ends in Zinnia pricking her finger and ending up in an alternate universe. Zinnia goes to another version of the Sleeping Beauty story, where she must save the princess to return to her world.

I love any fairy tale themed story so I was excited to read this one. I went into it without knowing what it was going to be about. Zinnia goes into the Sleeping Beauty universe, where all versions of the story live. She had to interact with a few different girls who are living through that storyline.

A big theme of this story was the toxic masculinity surrounding the Sleeping Beauty story. There are versions that are much more terrorizing than the Disney version that we all think of. The whole idea of a woman being awoken by the non-consensual kiss of a man is problematic enough, without looking at other versions where the men did more than that. This story had a good twist on that ending that made it more pleasant and feminist.

A Spindle Splintered was a great modern fairytale. I can’t wait to read the next book in the series!

What to read next:

Have you read A Spindle Splintered? What did you think of it?