A Quite short and interesting, especially writing this review after all the multiverse talk that has permeated the pop culture o sphere with the release of Spiderman: No Way Home.
In a nutshell, this is a Sleeping Beauty retelling where Zinnia Grey is our Briar Rose. She’s suffering from a genetic disease brought on by an Evil Corporation, but the clock is running out and she’s unlikely to make it to her twenty-first birthday.
Zinnia has decided to live life to the fullest, and she’s gotten a college degree in, essentially, Sleeping Beauty fairy tales. That’s very convenient because she ends up getting sucked into a different fairytale world where the Sleeping Beauty stand-in is living a much more traditional tale. The deeper that Zinnia delves into the story, though, the more there is to find–Prince Charming is Prince Creep, the parents are horrible, Sleeping Beauty 2.0 is also gay af, and the evil witch is…anything but.
This is a VERY short book, and that’s probably my biggest gripe with it! There’s a lot that gets thrown our way, and the plot wraps up a bit too quickly to really be fully satisfying. I wanted to spend all the time with the other Sleeping Beauties that Zinnia eventually meets. I wanted to see more of her inner thoughts around her lot in life and how her fatal, progressive disease has affected and not affected her life. This is the first in a series, but I’m not certain that we’ll keep following her or if we’ll switch to a different fairy tale next (and if so, please don’t bring up all the reasons why my perennial fave Beauty and the Beast is problematic I know it is and I love it anyhow).