Review: A Spindle Splintered, by Alix E. Harrow

[Russ Allbery]

A Spindle Splintered
by Alix E. Harrow

Series:    Fractured Fables #1
Publisher: Tordotcom
Copyright: 2021
ISBN:      1-250-76536-6
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     121

Zinnia Gray lives in rural Ohio and is obsessed with Sleeping Beauty,
even though the fairy tale objectively sucks. That has a lot to do with
having Generalized Roseville Malady, an always-fatal progressive
amyloidosis caused by teratogenic industrial waste. No one with GRM has
ever lived to turn twenty-two. A Spindle Splintered opens on Zinnia's
twenty-first birthday.

For her birthday, her best (and only) friend Charm (Charmaine Baldwin)
throws her a party at the tower. There aren't a lot of towers in Ohio;
this one is a guard tower at an abandoned state penitentiary
occasionally used by the local teenagers, which is not quite the image
one would get from fairy tales. But Charm fills it with roses, guests
wearing cheap fairy wings, beer, and even an honest-to-god spinning
wheel. At the end of the night, Zinnia decides to prick her finger on
the spindle on a whim. Much to both of their surprise, that's enough to
trigger some form of magic in Zinnia's otherwise entirely mundane
world. She doesn't fall asleep for a thousand years, but she does get
dumped into an actual fairy-tale tower near an actual princess, just in
time to prevent her from pricking her finger.

This is, as advertised on the tin, a fractured fairy tale, but it's one
that barely introduces the Sleeping Beauty story before driving it
entirely off the rails. It's also a fractured fairy tale in which the
protagonist knows exactly what sort of story she's in, given that she
graduated early from high school and has a college degree in folk
studies. (Dying girl rule #1: move fast.) And it's one in which the
fairy tale universe still has cell reception, if not chargers, which
means you can text your best friend sarcastic commentary on your
multiversal travels. Also, cell phone pictures of the impossibly
beautiful princess.

I should mention up-front that I have not watched Spider-Man: Into the
Spider-Verse (yes, I know, I'm sure it's wonderful, I just don't watch
things, basically ever), which is a quite explicit inspiration for this
story. I'm therefore not sure how obvious the story would be to people
familiar with that movie. Even with my familiarity with the general
genre of fractured fairy tales, nothing plot-wise here was all that
surprising. What carries this story is the characters and the emotional
core, particularly Zinnia's complex and sardonic feelings about dying
and the note-perfect friendship between Zinnia and Charm.

  "You know it wasn't originally a spinning wheel in the story?" I
  offer, because alcohol transforms me into a chatty Wikipedia page.

A Spindle Splintered is told from Zinnia's first-person perspective,
and Zinnia is great. My favorite thing about Harrow's writing is the
fierce and complex emotions of her characters. The overall tone is
lighter than The Once and Future Witches or The Ten Thousand Doors of
January, but Harrow doesn't shy away from showing the reader Zinnia's
internal thought process about her illness (and her eye-rolling
bemusement at some of the earlier emotional stages she went through).

  Dying girl rule #3 is no romance, because my entire life is one long
  trolley problem and I don't want to put any more bodies on the
  tracks. (I've spent enough time in therapy to know that this isn't
  "a healthy attitude towards attachment," but I personally feel that
  accepting my own imminent mortality is enough work without also
  having a healthy attitude about it.)

There's a content warning for parents here, since Harrow spends some
time on the reaction of Zinnia's parents and the complicated dance
between hope, despair, smothering, and freedom that she and they had to
go through. There were no easy answers and all balances were fragile,
but Zinnia always finds her feet. For me, Harrow's character writing is
like emotional martial arts: rolling with punches, taking falls,
clear-eyed about the setbacks, but always finding a new point of
stability to punch back at the world. Zinnia adds just enough teenage
irreverence and impatience to blunt the hardest emotional hits. I
really enjoy reading it.

The one caution I will make about that part of the story is that the
focus is on Zinnia's projected lifespan and not on her illness
specifically. Harrow uses it as setup to dig into how she and her
parents would react to that knowledge (and I thought those parts were
done well), but it's told from the perspective of "what would you do if
you knew your date of death," not from the perspective of someone
living with a disability. It is to some extent disability as plot
device, and like the fairy tale that it's based on, it's deeply
invested in the "find a cure" approach to the problem. I'm not disabled
and am not the person to ask about how well a story handles disability,
but I suspect this one may leave something to be desired.

I thought the opening of this story is great. Zinnia is a great
first-person protagonist and the opening few chapters are overflowing
with snark and acerbic commentary. Dumping Zinnia into another world
but having text messaging still work is genius, and I kind of wish
Harrow had made that even more central to the book. The rest of the
story was good but not as good, and the ending was somewhat predictable
and a bit of a deus ex machina. But the characters carried it
throughout, and I will happily read more of this. Recommended, with the
caveat about disability and the content warning for parents.

Followed by A Mirror Mended, which I have already pre-ordered.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-12-28

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-76536-6.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>