By Laura McGill

Sleeping Beauty has hundreds of versions, with new ones printed every year. Most readers know the glossy animation, perhaps a few scraps of older, darker folklore, and maybe a sprinkling of modern retellings. You can’t surprise an American audience. They know what to expect: first the curse, then the spindle, finally the kiss.

The trick to retelling such a well-known tale is satisfying reader expectations while creating true surprises. A Spindle Splintered by Alix Harrow isn’t shy about delivering all the classic elements and then going absolutely bonkers. Harrow Describes her book as Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse but for fairy tales. Imagine all the Sleeping Beauties from all the different retellings all mashed together, each cursed with eternal sleep.

The story begins with Zinnia, a terminally ill girl dying in Ohio. Instead of an evil fairy, Zinnia has the careless megacorporation that polluted her town and infected her lungs. Instead of a handsome prince, she has a best friend with a hero complex. Instead of enchanted sleep, she waits for the day when her lungs fill up with fluid and suffocate her. The doctors give her weeks, not months, to live.

Kisses don’t cure you in the real world—fairy tales will only take you so far.

I never liked Sleeping Beauty. The story did nothing for me, even as a kid. The Disney movie is a visual masterpiece but I could never figure out the point of it. There’s a pretty girl and then bad stuff happens to her until someone else wakes her up. What was I supposed to learn from this? Look hot so that a stranger might rescue you?

The main character agrees with my point of view. Zinnia’s opening line confesses “Sleeping Beauty is pretty much the worst fairy tale, any way you slice it.”

She tells you everything that’s wrong with the Sleeping Beauty myth, from the plucky modern retellings to the oldest and darkest versions that we never tell to children. The whole story hinges on waiting, asleep, for someone to come and save you from your curse.

Then she explains why she loves it. In chapter one she remembers being six and seeing Arthur Rackham’s classic illustration of Sleeping Beauty.

“She looked beautiful. She looked dead. Later I’d find out that’s how every Sleeping Beauty looks—hot and blond and dead, lying in a bed that might be a bier. I touched the curve of her cheek, the white of her palm, half hypnotized.

 But I wasn’t really a goner until I turned the page. She was still hot and blond but no longer dead. Her eyes were wide open, blue as June, defiantly alive.

And it was like—I don’t know. A beacon being lit, a flint being struck in my chest… It was like looking into a mirror and seeing my face reflected brighter and better. It was my own shitty story made mythic and grand and beautiful. A princess cursed at birth. A sleep that never ends. A dying girl who refused to die.”

This explanation hit me hard. It grabbed me by the face and yelled. “Yes, absolutely this is a Sleeping Beauty retelling. Strap in because we’re gonna give you the full fairy tale experience but also, we’re gonna make this a metaphor for death or whatever other “curses” you’re carrying around.  Ok? Ok, let’s go!”

It asks us to see the parallels between Zinnia’s bleak situation and the larger Sleeping Beauty mega myth. It promises that no matter how pointless her inevitable death seems, if we stick around, we’ll see something mythic, grand, and beautiful.

The author balances the mundane and the magical as Zinnia climbs the staircase of an abandoned state penitentiary tower. Of course, her twenty first birthday party would be in a tower.

“I waft up the staircase…The highest room in the tower has always been empty except for the detritus left by time and teenagers: windblown leaves, beer tabs, cicada shells, a condom or two. It’s not empty tonight. There are strings of pearled lights crisscrossing the ceiling and long swaths of blushing fabric draped over the windows; a dozen or so people wearing the kind of gauzy fairy wings that come from the year-round Halloween store at the mall; roses absolutely everywhere, bursting from buckets and mason jars and Carlo Rossi jugs. And in the very center of the room, looking dusty and rickety and somehow grand: a spinning wheel.” (Chapter one)

As soon as you see the spinning wheel you know what’s going to happen, what has to happen. You’re waiting, peeking through your own fingers in an “I can’t watch” kind of way. You experience instant tension as you watch the inevitable unfold.

But then, it doesn’t unfold the way you expected it to. It launches you into a series of surprises in alternate dimensions with every possible version of Sleeping Beauty. When at last the final kiss arrives (because there has to be a kiss), you’re so wrapped up in the adventure that it’s a shock. What does it mean? Does this actually fix anything?

A Spindle Splintered completes the checklist of Required Sleeping Beauty Plot Elements while cleverly twisting the tale into so much more. It lovingly presents a centuries old classic, adds crazy new fantasy elements, and leaves you feeling a little stronger—maybe even strong enough to face your own curses.

Add A Spindle Splintered to your reading list on Goodreads. It is available on Amazon, or you can support your local bookstore by purchasing your copy on IndieBound.