★★★★☆ There are worse things...

A Spindle Splintered

Alix E. Harrow

...than sleeping for a hundred years. In fact, in the Grimm's Fairy Tale Little Briar Rose, which turned into what we now call "Sleeping Beauty", it was to avoid the most obvious of these, death, that Rose was cast into her enchanted sleep. In Alix E. Harrow's A Spindle Splintered our hero suffers from a different one, "fatal teratogenic damage caused by corporate malfeasance", although that is really just a longer and more specific version of "death". This was not a curse placed on her by a scorned wise woman -- as she notes, "Wicked fairies are thin on the ground in rural Ohio." But, sadly, good fairies are no more common there than wicked ones. No one with GRM (Generalized Roseville Malady) has survived past the age of twenty-one, and the story starts on Zinnia's twenty-first birthday. Zinnia doesn't expect to fall into a hundred years sleep, but any day now she will die.

She has, however, been obsessed with Sleeping Beauty since her sixth birthday, when she saw Arthur Rackham's illustrated Sleeping Beauty (which you can now read for free at Project Gutenberg. She even got an undergraduate degree in Folklore (Folk Studies and Anthropology, to be precise) and wrote "a two-hundred-page thesis on representations of disability and chronic illness in European folklore", in which versions of Sleeping Beauty figured.

This is all relevant because the story of Sleeping Beauty has been told many, many times, and Zinnia knows all about the many other Sleeping Beauties who exist in other universes. And we are going to meet a bunch of them. We learn about the fates worse than sleep from which sleep was to save them. It's not always death. You yourself may have different preferences than the various Sleeping Beauties.

It's a fun hook on which to build a fantasy novella, and I'm glad to have read it. A small warning: if you were hoping for a Sleeping Beauty retelling, you're likely to be disappointed. This, even though A Spindle Splintered is illustrated with cut-and-pastes versions of Rackham's original illustrations. (I think I enjoyed T. Kingfisher's Thornhedge, a recent Sleeping Beauty retelling, more, though.)

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