I’ve enjoyed the previous novels I’ve read by Alix E. Harrow (particularly The Ten Thousand Doors of January and Starling House), so when I came across Fractured Fables on a recent trip to the bookstore, I was excited to find something by her that I had not yet read. This is actually a collection of two stories (I never know what the difference is between a “short story” and a “novella”, but they’re both 100-ish pages long, including some cool illustrations), A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended.
Narrated by Zinnia Gray, a dying twenty-year old (she has a condition as a result of her mother being exposed to some destructive chemicals while pregnant) with a degree in folklore (and a particular obsession with the story of Sleeping Beauty, in all of it’s iterations, as it’s the fairytale she most closely associates with the direction of her own life). On the eve of her twenty-first birthday, she pricks her finger on a spindle (it was a gift from her best friend, Charm) and finds herself transported into another iteration of the Sleeping Beauty narrative, where, since she believes she can’t save herself from her illness, becomes determined to save the princess she finds there from her own similar fate.
In the intro to the book, Harrow describes her inspiration for this set of stories as coming to her after viewing the film Into the Spiderverse, and essentially wanting to write that, but for myths. This is absolutely accurate. The tone of the book is more modern and funnier than I’ve seen in her previous work, and I enjoyed both stories a lot (although I did like the first better than the second). My only wish is that they were longer—I would have liked more time to get to know the characters and I think the emotional moments would have hit harder if they were more developed. Overall though, it’s a quick and fun read!