A Mirror Mended

by Alix E. Harrow

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 128
Series: Fractured Fairytales #2
Rating:

Synopsis:

Zinnia Gray, professional fairy-tale fixer and lapsed Sleeping Beauty is over rescuing snoring princesses. Once you’ve rescued a dozen damsels and burned fifty spindles, once you’ve gotten drunk with twenty good fairies and made out with one too many members of the royal family, you start to wish some of these girls would just get a grip and try solving their own narrative issues.

Just when Zinnia’s beginning to think she can't handle one more princess, she glances into a mirror and sees another face looking back at her: the shockingly gorgeous face of evil, asking for her help. Because there’s more than one person trapped in a story they didn’t choose. Snow White's Evil Queen has found out how her story ends and she's desperate for a better ending. She wants Zinnia to help her before it’s too late for everyone.

Will Zinnia accept the Queen's poisonous request, and save them both from the hot iron shoes that wait for them, or will she try another path?

A Mirror Mended follows more or less straight on from A Spindle Splintered, and Alix E. Harrow doesn’t give you a lot of background or reminding about the first book — they’re probably best read back-to-back. They don’t follow straight on in time, but they might as well: part of the issue in A Spindle Splintered is that Zinnia hasn’t really thought about what the events of the previous book mean for her. She’s running, still.

I found it all somewhat less, well, charming, without Charm so actively in the mix somehow — her love for Zinnia, her determination to help her, is a really strong part of the appeal. She’s not gone, of course, but for the majority of the story she’s in the background, and Zinnia is trying really hard not to think about her too much.

The romance in this book feels a little too speedy, though I think it could’ve worked for me with a bit more time. I still enjoyed what Harrow did with the meta nature of the story, though, and it’s a fun read.

Rating: 3/5

A Spindle Splintered

by Alix E. Harrow

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 119
Series: Fractured Fairytales #1
Rating:

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.

Alix E. Harrow’s A Spindle Splintered is a delightfully meta take on Sleeping Beauty, inspired by the Spider-verse. Which makes it sound kind of gimmicky, perhaps, but it (mostly) isn’t — it’s created out of love for the story, for all the ways humans have told the story of Sleeping Beauty, and what a modern take can look like.

Being a novella, it doesn’t go super deeply into world-building or anything: the point is obviously the play with the tropes, the pure fun of summoning a space princess with a blaster gun to save a Sleeping Beauty from her fate. And it works: I tore through it, and loved Zinnia’s relationships with Charm and with her parents, and with Charm falling head over heels for Primrose.

In some ways, I liked Zinnia’s feelings toward her own narrative, the fact that she knows she’s going to die, and sometimes I wanted to tell her to just give it a rest. Which would be unfair with a real person, of course, but it isn’t always super fun to read about in fiction.

Overall, though, very enjoyable, and I’m keen to read the second novella soon too.

Rating: 4/5