A Spindle Splintered

, #1

eBook, 128 pages

English language

Published Oct. 5, 2021 by Tor Publishing Group.

ISBN:
978-1-250-76535-2
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(2 reviews)

USA Today bestselling author Alix E. Harrow’s A Spindle Splintered brings her patented charm to a new version of a classic story. Featuring Arthur Rackham’s original illustrations for The Sleeping Beauty, fractured and reimagined.

“A vivid, subversive and feminist reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, where implacable destiny is no match for courage, sisterhood, stubbornness and a good working knowledge of fairy tales.” —Katherine Arden

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, …

2 editions

reviewed A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow (Fractured Fables, #1)

Short and decent, but could be better

This was a surprisingly short read and it shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to finish it. The beginning of the book didn’t pull me in at all so I struggled until after around the thirty-percent mark when it picked up the pace.

This book is a feminist spin on a classic fairy tale and I think it was done okay but from a rather white feminist perspective. I think what misled me was that majority of reviewers labelled this as “diverse” on StoryGraph. To an extent, that’s true—the protagonist is terminally ill, and the other two prominent characters are lesbians. But there are no significant characters of colour. I guess people of colour can’t exist in fairy tales or Ohio?

Anyway, that was quite disappointing. White people need to remember that diversity doesn’t and shouldn’t just end at LGBT representation.

The writing also came off …

Subjects

  • Fantasy
  • Fiction
  • Mythology
  • LGBT