by Alix E. Harrow
Tordotcom
10/05/2021, hardcover
SKU: 9781250765352
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.
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.
Reviews:
"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, bestselling author of the Winternight trilogy
"It's funny, sharp, queer, and deeply loves its source material... This novella pushes against the hopelessness of inevitability; it dares us to believe in sympathetic magic; it tells us we're connected through story. It might dent your heart a little, but it's good fun." -- NPR
"A wonderfully imaginative, and Queer as hell, tale for those who who wish to be the authors of their own stories." -- Kalynn Bayron, author of Cinderella is Dead
"This is a self-aware, empowered riff on Sleeping Beauty that manages to be thrilling, funny, smart, and sweet." -- Sarah Pinsker, Nebula Award-winning author of A Song for a New Day
"Themes of female friendship, female strength, and female independence leave good feels behind, not to mention some laugh-out-loud bits...This fairy tale-superhero movie mashup is pure entertainment." -- Kirkus Reviews
About the Author:
Alix E. Harrow, a former academic and adjunct, is a Hugo-award winning writer living in Virginia with her husband and their two semi-feral kids. She is the author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, and various short fiction.