A Spindle Splintered by Alix E Harrow
Publisher – Tordotcom
Published – Out Now
Price – £13.99 hardback £6.57 kindle eBook
"Sleeping Beauty is the worst fairy tale, pretty much any way you slice it. It’s aimless and amoral and chauvinist as shit. Even among the other nerds who majored in folklore, Sleeping Beauty is nobody’s favorite. The romantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; vanilla girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White. Only the dying girls like Sleeping Beauty." It's Zinnia Gray's twenty-first birthday, which is an extra-special occasion, because it's the last she'll ever have. When she was young, an industrial accident left Zinnia with a rare condition. Not much is known about her illness, but the main fact for Zinnia is that no one who has it has lived to twenty-two. Her best friend is intent on making Zin's last birthday special with a full sleeping beauty experience, complete with a tower and a spinning wheel. But when Zinnia pricks her finger, she founds herself cast into another world, with another sleeping beauty, just as desperate to escape her fate
We have had a great surge in stories re-examining fairy tales and folk tales in recent years and overall, I think this is a good thing. Such stories should be re-appraised each generation to say is this still selling us something or exploring the less than savoury messages some stories tell us. In Alix E Harrow’s new novella, A Spindle Splintered we start a new series of fractured fables but ultimately the delivery of this story didn’t quite live up to my expectations.
Zinnia lives in modern day America and thanks to environmental pollution is suffering from a progressive and ultimately fatal disease that usually results in death for those in their early twenties. Today is her twenty-first birthday and after a party with her family she meets her best friend Charm in the watchtower of an abandoned prison. Zinnia has found one story that has stuck her through the years with the many versions of Sleeping Beauty – another young woman who appears cursed and knows a long sleep is in her future but for whom there will be a happy ending. But while Charm and Zinnia try to celebrate this bittersweet day a strange feeling takes over and Zinnia awaits to find herself in a castle with a young princess and a spindle…
Ultimately, I came away from reading this story with a sense of frustration. The idea of a character with a major illness linking it to the idea of Sleeping Beauty is really interesting and an unusual hook. Making a story about what even Zinnia admits is one of the female characters with the least agency ever is also a bold choice but ultimately, I never felt the story really went matched this idea. We do get a plot that talks about the limited rights for women in these times; hidden sexuality and making the best use of your time but in many ways, this is just an overly familiar modern character in a fairy tale. None of these insights are actually unique and for me have been done better in other stories. There is a reference to 90s fairy tale remakes where the kickass 90s heroine shows she is as good as the boys and part of me think this story wouldn’t be a million miles away from that version. For the 2020s I’m expecting something a lot more relevant to be explored and that feels like it is missing.
Trying to work out why I’ve had this reaction I’ve ultimately come down to Zinnia our first-person narrator and how I never buy the character as a real person. Zinnia loves geeky references, the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie and even the cartoon show Gargoyles but she is supposed to be 21 and this all comes across as an older writer’s voice and preferences. While I get that Zinnia’s condition may have made her mature faster, but I never really buy her as a person in her own right. I feel instead I’ve read a pilot episode for a new series and can only hope it develops more in future instalments.
Harrow does as always have great writing and there are moments when Zinnia is talking about death, family relationships and friendship that do chime and flow really well but overall I never felt this all came together in a full story and for this Subjective Chaos category I’m looking for a tale that uses the format really well. I think you can enjoy this story I just suspect it won’t stay in your memory for long afterwards.
