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    A Spindle Splintered
    A Spindle Splintered
    A Spindle Splintered
    Ebook149 pages1 hour

    A Spindle Splintered

    By Alix E. Harrow

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    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.

    “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

    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.

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 5, 2021
    ISBN9781250765369
    Author

    Alix E. Harrow

    Alix E. Harrow is the Hugo Award winning author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, and various short fiction. Her Fractured Fables series, beginning with the novella A Spindle Splintered, has been praised for its refreshing twist on familiar fairy tales. A former academic and adjunct, Harrow lives in Virginia with her husband and their two semi-feral kids.

    Read more from Alix E. Harrow

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    Reviews for A Spindle Splintered

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    • 4/5
      The writing is taut and emotionally controlled for a dying girl has a fairy tale adventure story. Zinnia is able to both handle herself and see beyond herself as she confronts the gross unfairness which classic fiction displays and deplores.
    • 4/5
      Fall 2021 (October);
      ~ Netgalley Arc

      Thank you to Alix E. Harrow, Macmillan Audio, and Netgalley for a free audio copy of A Spindle Splintered for an honest review.

      It remains a truth uncrackable, I will find and fall in love with everything that Alix has written. This is a delightful story about sleeping beauties, finding your power, and rewriting your own narrative. This book is breathtaking in its scope, made me laugh in unexpected places, and (like every novel of hers before this one) found at least one spot where I was suddenly blinking away tears.

      I want to galavant across the multiverse with the amazing girls of this story, finding ways to free the princesses (and the Evil Fairies & Queens) of our longest-held mythos bits. This story has something for everyone in it, and a whole lot of girl power, breaking free of your chains, and learning how to fan the flames of hope into a blaze nothing is allowed to knock out. I can't wait to own a copy of this.
    • 4/5
      Effing brilliant fairy tale remix and I can't tell you anything about it because that would be spoiling things, but this fantasy novella is excellent and if you like the Seanan McGuire Wayward Children series, or fairy tales at all, you may find lots to love here too. I did. Totally reading the sequel.
    • 5/5
      I loved this! The story does a great job subverting where you expect it to go, and then subverting it again. There's a great cast of characters, several of whom are queer. The protagonist is utterly compelling. Wonderful!
    • 4/5
      A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Horrow is a great novella for fans of a fairytale reimagining of Sleeping Beauty. Zinnia Gray has a rare illness that doctors don’t know much about, except that others with the same illness have not lived past age 21. For Zinnia’s 21st birthday, her best friend, Charm, plans a special celebration for Zinnia with a complete sleeping beauty experience. The birthday party takes place in a tower with a spinning wheel. Zinnia pricks her finger on the spinning wheel and she finds herself in another world with a young woman hopeful to change the course of her destiny.

      Alix takes a historic fairytale and turns it into a modern telling of the story. Zinnia pulls at my heart strings; to be such a young woman fighting a rare illness that has her, and her parents, feeling like death is constantly at her back door is agonizing. Her best friend, Charm, is an amazing friend determined to save Zinnia’s life by solving the mystery of her illness. The conclusion of the story was terrific. A satisfying, yet unexpected ending, with a beautiful revelation. I love seeing characters grow.

      The hardcover edition of this book is a work of art. There are beautiful black and white images throughout the pages.

      I have photos and additional information that I'm unable to include here. It can all be found on my blog, in the link below.
      A Book And A Dog
    • 3/5
      Zinnia Gray is terminally ill and just turned 21 when she finds herself in the castle of a real Sleeping Beauty. The story is one part The Fault in our Stars and one part Gaiman's The Sleeper and the Spindle. I loved the author's other books, but by its very nature this slip of a novel doesn’t give the reader enough time to feel too attached.
    • 5/5
      "A vivid, subversive and feminist reimagining of 'Sleeping Beauty'" says Katherine Arden, and so it is. Excellent.
    • 5/5
      Wow. What a fantastic retelling of sleeping beauty. This is a short novel it leaves itself open for multiple sequels that I can’t wait to read. The modern sleeping beauty is actually a sick young woman with a fatal disease. It’s her 21st birthday and people with her disease don’t see 22. Celebrating her birthday in the top of the tall tower she pricks her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel as a joke, but that is where the joke ends. Zinna Gray is transported to another room where she has the ability to save another sleeping beauty and to learn more about the past and history of the current, future, and other world sleeping beauties. This book is part fairytale part fantasy, all adventure and all heart. It is faithful but also completely unfaithful to the Disney stories you know and to the historical stories you don’t. This book is fantastic and I can’t wait to read what comes out next.
    • 3/5
      Ultimately, I found this story disappointing. Having read Alix Harrow's Starling House, I was expecting to love her fractured fairytales. I only finished it because it was so short, and because the story itself really was interesting. I struggled through it, though, because I struggled to relate to the characters. I also felt like at times it was trying to hard to push an agenda, which usually turns me off. Maybe if I had read this first, I would have enjoyed it more, not having such high standards.
    • 5/5
      Listened to this one in the car with Areg.

      Like a few dozen other children in her small town, Zinn (short for Zinnia, the flower) was "cursed" to die by the age of 21 by a factory that pumped toxic chemicals into the local water. She's lived her life acutely aware of her limited time, dashing through high school and earning a degree in fairy tale and folklore stories. Her fascination with them comes from her interest in the Sleeping Beauty story, in which she sees parallels to her own life--minus the hopeful caveat that the beauty only sleeps for 100 years instead of dying.

      On her 21st birthday, which will probably be her last, Zinn's best friend, Char (Charm? Our car isn't very soundproof, so it was hard to tell) arranges a Sleeping Beauty-themed party in an abandoned tower, complete with antique spindle. A finger prick catapults her into a truly fairy tale world, where she prevents Primrose, another Sleeping Beauty, from pricking her own finger on her own spindle. Like Zinn, Primrose has lived under the heavy burden of her curse's deadline. Unlike Zinn, Primrose would only sleep, which doesn't sound half bad when the alternative is a political marriage to a guy she doesn't like among all the guys she's never liked liked. Armed with Zinn's knowledge of fairy tale tropes, Prim's surprising savviness, and Char just a text away (as long as Zinn's phone has batteries), Zinn and Prim set off to find the witch who laid Prim's curse, hoping she can help lift both their curses. And Zinn's going to need the help--she doesn't have any of the medications that keep her disease from rapid development.

      This extremely self-aware story is very fun but definitely requires some appreciation of fairy tales and knowledge of (pre-pandemic) pop culture. Harrow does a good job of using Zinn to explain the various variants of Sleeping Beauty that you need to know to follow the story, so you won't be totally lost. Zinn also has a pretty dry, morbid, and sarcastic sense of humor that I suspect could annoy some people. (As someone who uses too many parentheses and em dashes, I also enjoyed Zinn's asides that might otherwise be annoying, especially in an audiobook where you can't easily review the part of the sentence that came before.) It also doesn't hurt that I loved the story of Sleeping Beauty when I was growing up (despite Zinn's insistence that no one likes Sleeping Beauty).

      Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this feminist fairy tale retelling/critique that featured a lot of women making the best of bad situations, lots of friendly and familial love, and a sweet crush-to-girlfriend side story. The retelling mashup was a unique approach in my reading experience, and as someone who is a casual nerd about fairy tales, I enjoyed the meta elements. I'd be happy to read the forthcoming sequel!
    • 5/5
      While short, this packs plenty of action into the narrative and creates a great story with appealing characters, save for Prince Harold who's arrogant and dumber than a box of rocks, but a completely unique take on the effects of an environmentally induced illness. Add in a strong feminist influence, coupled with a terrific ending full of promise and opportunity and you have a true winner.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoy the Fractured Fables series. The first one I read was actually #2, and I enjoyed it so much that it made me want to come back and read #1 to see how it all started.

      Zinnia Gray is not expected to live past the age of 21, due to her illness. When her best friend Charm creates a super special Sleeping Beauty experience for her -- spinning wheel included -- Zinnia finds that pricking her finger has a very different effect on her than in the fairy tale. Rather than falling asleep, she is transported into another dimension and another Sleeping Beauty's story. Together she and Sleeping Beauty try their darnedest to both escape their fates and rewrite their stories.

      This was a fun, quick read, and I love that it is an empowering feminist take on the traditional fairy tale. I look forward to reading more in this series!
    • 5/5
      From the very first paragraphs I was sucked in to this story, and I did not want to let it go. It has fairy tale retellings, fantasy logic, crossing the multiverse, and coming of age stories.
    • 4/5
      when fairy tales, folklore scholarship, and a contemporary perspective collide, something has to give, and it's not gonna be the princesses, Sleeping Beauties though they may be. the Arthur Rackham internal illustrations adopt the negative-silhouette style, which fits right into the novella's narrative as a nicely witty touch, too.
    • 4/5
      Loved this novella it is the best retelling of Sleeping Beauty that I've read. I love then Zin is strong and still has hope in the face of hopelessness. I really liked the ending, she's not cured but she's ready to go out and fight for other women that have a similar fate to hers.
    • 4/5
      Unlike Tepper's rendition of Sleeping Beauty, this doesn't disappoint. It's at turns matter-of-fact and heartbreaking, which is the same thing considering the narrator is 'cursed' with a teratogenic illness that slates her for an early death, and ultimately optimistic, and also just a lot of fun as she romps around fantasy land with her fairy tale counterpart.
    • 4/5
      The best friend in the Sleeping Beauty book is named "Charm" on like page 2. Quick work!
    • 4/5
      Fun. Short. Enjoyed the characters
    • 3/5
      Amusingly crass and cheeky. Not just a fairy tale retelling but a light exposition of how horribly women are portrayed in fairy tales.
    • 4/5
      First thing’s first. I adore Alix E. Harrow’s novels. I find her writing is spellbinding. In A Spindle Splintered, she tackles the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale with her unique storytelling. This Sleeping Beauty’s curse is a lot less fantastic and a lot more mundane. Yet, with her feminist eye, Ms. Harrow creates a tale as old as time and yet refreshing in its newness. As it appears that her fractured fairy tales are going to be a series, I am really excited to see which fairy tale she tackles next!
    • 4/5
      This take on Sleeping Beauty has a fresh feel and a fast pace. Zinnia Gray is dying, from an illness that ensures she's unlikely to live much past her 21st birthday. She's also obsessed with Sleeping Beauty, so when she finds herself in an alternative universe with a very real version of Sleeping Beauty, Zinnia is more than ready to turn this fairy tale on its head. Which she does, hoping not only to save Sleeping Beauty but also herself. A fun read with a more grown-up take on a classic fairy tale.
    • 4/5
      "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."
      Series Info/Source: This is the 1st book in the Fractured Fables novella series I borrowed a copy of this on audiobook from the library.

      Thoughts: I listened to this on audiobook and the audiobook was very well done. I enjoyed this. It is a well done extension of The Sleeping Beauty fairy tale that ties in with parallel realities. I engaged with the characters right away and enjoyed the simple but engaging storyline.

      The book follows Zinnia who has a rare medical condition that means she will die in her early 20's. In an effort to make her 21st birthday super special her best friend, Charm, reenacts a scene from Sleeping Beauty, Zinnia's favorite fairy tale. Unfortuantely, things don't go as planned and Zinnia is whisked off to another realm, where a princess named Primrose is dodging her own forever sleep.

      This was one of those pleasant fairy tale extensions that was just a nice, simple read. While there isn't anything super special about this I enjoyed the characters, how humorous and heart-felt it was, and the interesting discussions around classic fairy tales.

      Zinnia is a fairly likable character who's been doomed to die young as long as she can remember. She jumps at the idea of helping Primrose eliminate her curse. There are a lot of parallels drawn between long-term illness and curses.

      The book also discusses old fairy tales (like the origin fairy tales) their violence towards women and how helpless women are in a lot of them. I love how this story flipped a lot of those old tales and curses on their head and focused on how women can help other women instead.

      There is a parallel universe aspect to the whole thing that felt a bit forced, but worked fine for describing why Zinnia got whisked to another world. This also provided a decent plot device for why Zinnia can journey to other worlds in future books in this series.

      My Summary (4/5): Overall, while this isn't anything groundbreaking or amazing, I enjoyed it. It's a nice contemporary fantasy that explores and expands on the classic Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. There are fun characters, some intriguing parallel world elements, and just a nice, relatively simple, fairy tale extension story. It was well written and fun to read. I would recommend if you enjoy modern sorts of fairy tale retellings and want a short read or listen.
    • 3/5
      Bestselling author, Alix E. Harrow (The Once and Future Witches), gives a feminist twist on the classic Sleeping Beauty tale in this inventive and empowering novella. A Spindle Splintered is the first in a new series of fairy retellings, Fractured Fables. Zinnia Gray's twenty-first birthday is bittersweet; she lives with a rare condition that no one has ever lived past the age of twenty-two. The clock is ticking and she is torn between wanting to live her own life and comforting her parents. When her best friend throws her a surprise birthday party in an old prison tower complete with warm beer, roses, and an old spindle, Zinnia is touched. She may be too old for her favorite fairy tale, but what's the harm in a little make believe? When she jokingly pricks her finger on the spindle, she finds herself transported to another time and place where a young girl's clock is running out just like hers. The two girls decide to take their destiny's in their own hands and race against the clock and their curses to make better futures for themselves. Amy Landon brilliantly narrates this inspired retelling while making it exciting and magical. Although a quick listen at less than four hours, this is a great start to a new series that fans of fairy tales and feminist literature will enjoy.
    • 3/5
      Sleeping beauty spends her whole life trying to circumvent a curse to sleep; Similarly, Zinnia has spent her whole life evading an early death. Zinnia’s best friend organizes the last birthday party, worthy of sleeping beauty herself. When Zinnia pricks her finger she is transported astronomically far from home. With the help of new and old friends, Zinnia works to rewrite destiny.

      A Spindle Splintered is a retelling of sleeping beauty through the multiverse. Alix has filled this short story with tributes to empowerment, LGBTQUI+, death, and chronic illnesses. The images throughout the novella do not depict the actions of the story. Rather, they appear to be mischievous. Even so, they are mesmerizing to look at.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting look at the Sleeping Beauty myth and how it can be changed by the girls involved.
      Zinnia Gray has a disease that will kill her young. A disease caused by an industrial accident but she does not want to go quietly. She has always been fascinated by the Sleeping Beauty Myth and her friend Charm throws her a Sleeping Beauty Party complete with Spinning Wheel and she pricks her finger and ends up in another dimension and dealing with another girl who may be a sleeping beauty who she tries to save, but the story is more complicated than it seems.
      I really enjoyed this read and it's take on the various versions of the story.
    • 5/5
      Zinnia Gray has an unusual genetic disorder that no one has survived to the age of 22. Maybe that's why she's always felt an affinity for Sleeping Beauty and went on to study fairy tales in college. Today is her 21st birthday, but when she sleeps from her own story into another's, she and the Princess Primrose decide to take their fate into their own hands.

      I have enjoyed Harrow's novels, but I liked this novella even more. It's a feminist and queer retelling, and I loved how many references to fairy tales and other fantasy stories were included. The illustrations of silhouettes by Arthur Rackham have been redesigned in unsettling ways but fit with the story beautifully. And though there is a sequel out, the ending was pretty satisfying on its own.
    • 4/5
      This retelling of “Sleeping Beauty” not only takes us through a door [one of Harrow’s favorite tropes] into the multiverse, but switches the story around to be a feminist manifesto with a lesbian slant.

      Zinnia Gray is twenty-one, and presumably will die soon, having been one of the unfortunate victims of corporate malfeasance from toxic dumping in rural Ohio. No one born with the resulting genetic damage ever made it to age twenty-two, and as the story begins, it is Zinnia’s twenty-first and presumably last birthday.

      For her last year, she informs us:

      “. . . really I have nothing planned but a finite number of family game nights, during which my parents will stare tenderly at me across the dining room table and I will slowly suffocate under the terrible weight of their love.”

      Because Zinnia knew she was cursed to die, she identified with the story of "Sleeping Beauty." Starting in childhood when she insisted on Sleeping Beauty character bed sheets, to being a college student majoring in Folk Studies and Anthropology at Ohio University, she has made the story the theme of her life.

      Zinnia's best friend “Charm” (short for Charmaine) arranges a 21st Sleeping Beauty themed birthday party for Zinnia replete with a spindle in an old abandoned tower. When Zinnia pricks her finger on it at the stroke of midnight as a joke, suddenly she is thrust into a different universe, waking up in the bedroom of Princess Primrose. Primrose was cursed to prick her own finger on her 21st birthday, which was the day before. She would then fall into a deep sleep for 100 years, unless she was rescued by the kiss of a handsome prince. Since her father the King has had all the spindles destroyed, she has resisted her fate so far, but Primrose knows it is only a matter of time. The only trouble is, Princess Primrose has no desire to be rescued by the pompous Prince Harold or any other prince for that matter - she would prefer a princess, if the truth be told.

      Thus Zinnia ends up with a couple of problems to solve: she needs to get back to her own universe, but first she needs to help Primrose escape her curse. She is aided by the fact that she still has some memory left on her smart phone, which improbably still works, and can get assistance from Charm. Zinnia snaps a photo of Primrose to send to Charm, who, also gay like Primrose, is immediately smitten. Added to her devotion to her best friend, Charm has plenty of motivation to work on a solution.

      This all may sound over-the-top, but Harrow manages to carry it off. With Zinnia’s sense of irony and self-awareness, she helps convince readers to believe in her and in this story that gets more convoluted by the chapter but also more “charming,” as it were.

      One of my favorite passages has Zinnia explaining to Primrose why she would find Zinnia’s world appealing:

      “You wouldn’t be a princess anymore, but you’re hot and white and young, so you could be pretty much anything else you wanted.”


      As for Zinnia, she discovers that as one moves among universes, “fairy tales are flexible about gender roles.” She also finally figures out what she wants to do with the rest of her life, however long it may be: “I’m just looking for a better once-upon-a-time.”

      Discussion: As Harrow has done in her other books, she turns preconceptions upside down with her through-the-door-to-other-worlds perspective and her unblinking honesty in interrogating hard subjects. What happens when you know someone you love is going to die? All too often, others get so focused on their own pain of the impending loss, they either suffocate or alienate the person who actually is the one needing the most care. We also see how perceptions of time between those who are dying and those who aren’t - “every minute has to count” versus “all the time in the world” - are as different as if these people did reside in different universes. And of course, in so many ways, they do. Harrow shows how fairy tales aren’t so unlikely and unfounded, when you universalize them into common human experiences.

      Evaluation: I have found all of Harrow's books so far to be entertaining, thought-provoking, and offering fresh enlightened perspectives on a number of subjects.
    • 4/5
      This book is a 120-page lead-up to a "Harold, they're lesbians" reference punchline. (Well, a 92-page lead-up, since that's where she threw it in. Still.) Cute, but multiple pop culturey references that are going to date this book pretty quickly. ("Harold, they're lesbians" is six years old already, which makes it an antique in some circles of the internet.) A lot of it felt like a prompted story I might have stumbled across on Tumblr--which isn't bad, as I really like Tumblr stories, but I also don't feel like it's going to stick with me or anything.

      Fractured fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty (yes, it is the worst fairy tale, as the protagonist says on page one), but improved through acknowledgment of how awful it is. I really wanted to know the stories of those other cursed princesses, especially the space princess.
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed this audiobook so much that I have already listened to it twice! I adored Alix E. Harrow’s first book, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, so I was eager to give her newest offering a try even though I don’t usually rush to pick up fairy tale retellings. This was such a fantastic twist on Sleeping Beauty’s tale and the characters were utterly amazing. I found this story to be entertaining and thought-provoking from beginning to end.

      Zinnia Gray is turning twenty-one at the opening of the story. That wouldn’t be such a big deal except for the fact that Zinnia has a rare disorder that will most likely kill her before she makes it to her next birthday. Her best friend, Charm, decides to throw her a Sleeping Beauty party complete with a spinning wheel. When Zinnia pricks her finger on the spindle, she is thrust into another world where Sleeping Beauty’s life is as desperate as her own.

      I loved the characters in this book. Zinnia was such a strong character. Her life has had a lot of challenges but I felt like her outlook was as positive as could be expected. I love that she wanted to help Primrose change her life and was able to rally others to make that happen. I felt like Zinnia showed a lot of growth during this story by learning to fight for herself and others. I also thought that the supporting characters were all expertly crafted, likable, and added a lot to the story.

      Amy Landon did a wonderful job with the narration of this book. I loved the way that she was able to bring Zinnia’s character to life. She added a lot of excitement and emotion to the story. This was just a really great listen!

      I would highly recommend this story to others. The writing was superb and I really liked the modern elements brought into the tale. I thought that the multi-verse was well done and I liked what it brought to the story. I will definitely be reading more of Alix E. Harrow’s work in the future.

      I received a digital review copy of this audiobook from Macmillan Audio via NetGalley.
    • 4/5
      4.5

      Despite opinions stated within this story, Sleeping Beauty is one of my favorites. So when I saw that Alix E Harrow was going to flip what has been traditionally known about this fable, I was all for it. But I think I really appreciated the fact that Alix (through main character Zinnia) really tackled all the complex and, let's face it, problematic issues regarding the Sleeping Beauty story throughout its many iterations. I think it was interesting to acknowledge where the story came from and how it morphed from Perrault to Disney and other things in between. Then, most of all, I enjoyed seeing where Alix E Harrow took the story.

      An industrial accident left Zinnia Gray with a rare condition. She is just turning twenty-one and doesn't expect to live much longer. Zinnia has much identified with the story of Sleeping Beauty - a young woman who lives under a curse to sleep for 100 years - except when the time comes Zinnia will not be falling asleep only to be awakened with true love's kiss. While Zinnia has grown evermore resigned to her fate, her best friend Charm is not ready to let go so easily.

      For her twenty-first birthday, Charm throws Zinnia a Sleeping Beauty-themed party, complete with a spinning wheel and everything. What starts as Zinnia cheekily playing along with the fairytale, ends up sending her through a portal where Zinnia meets Primrose, a princess who is also living her own Sleeping Beauty tale.

      Zinnia soon sees an opportunity to rewrite her own story, with the help of Primrose and interdimensional texting with Charm, Zinnia just may live to see her next adventure.

      For me, the story was all about changing your narrative. Taking the power that's rightfully yours and making your own story. I think it resonated so well in that regard. This idea of our fates being laid out before us set in stone, yet really it takes some determination - and let's face it an awesome support system - and we can obtain the unimaginable. I love that despite Zinnia's rather bleak outlook, there's so much hope infused within she just needs to find her path, her own story.

      I loved that this was such a quick read. I think that it made the story more fine-tuned to the really important parts. There was no time for extra, and Alix E Harrow really brought out all the best within the story making it feel very full.

      I see that this is listed as #1 of a new series so I'm really excited to see what fable Alix E Harrow decides to fracture next because I am here for it!

    Book preview

    A Spindle Splintered - Alix E. Harrow

    1

    SLEEPING BEAUTY IS pretty much the worst fairy tale, any way you slice it.

    It’s aimless and amoral and chauvinist as shit. It’s the fairy tale that feminist scholars cite when they want to talk about women’s passivity in historical narratives. ("She literally sleeps through her own climax, as my favorite gender studies professor used to say. Double entendre fully intended."). Jezebel ranked it as the least woke Disney movie of all time, which, in a world where The Little Mermaid exists, is really saying something. Ariel might have given up her voice for a dude, but Aurora barely uses hers: she has a grand total of eighteen (18) lines in her own movie, fewer than the prince, the villain, or any of the individual fairy godmothers.

    Even among the other nerds who majored in folklore, Sleeping Beauty is nobody’s favorite. Romantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; vanilla girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White.

    Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.

    I DON’T REMEMBER the first time I saw Sleeping Beauty—probably in some waiting room or hospital bed, interrupted by blipping machines and chirpy nurses—but I remember the first time I saw Arthur Rackham’s illustrations. It was my sixth birthday, after cake but before my evening pills. The second-to-last gift was a cloth-bound copy of Grimm’s fairy tales from Dad. I was flipping through it (pretending to be a little more excited than I actually was because even at six I knew my parents needed a lot of protecting) when I saw her: a woman in palest watercolor lying artfully across her bed. Eyes closed, one hand dangling white and limp, throat arched. Black-ink shadows looming like crows around her.

    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. Charm (Charmaine Baldwin, best/only friend) says Sleeping Beauty was my first crush and she’s not totally wrong, but it was more than that. 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.

    Objectively, I’m aware our stories aren’t that similar. Wicked fairies are thin on the ground in rural Ohio, and I’m not suffering from a curse so much as fatal teratogenic damage caused by corporate malfeasance. If you drew a Venn diagram between me and Briar Rose, the overlap would be: (1) doomed to die young, (2) hot, in a fragile, consumptive way, (3) named after flowers. (I mean, look: I have a folklore degree. I’m aware that Sleeping Beauty’s name has ranged from Talia to Aurora to Zellandine (do not Google that last one), but the Grimms called her Briar Rose and my name is Zinnia Gray, so just let me have this one, alright?). I’m not even blond.

    After that birthday I was pretty obsessed. It’s one of the rules for dying girls: if you like something, like it hard, because you don’t have a lot of time to waste. So I had Sleeping Beauty bedsheets and Sleeping Beauty toothpaste and Sleeping Beauty Barbies. My bookshelves filled with Grimm and Lang and then McKinley and Levine and Yolen. I read every retelling and every picture book; I bought a DVD set of the original Alvin and the Chipmunks run just to watch episode 85B, The Legend of Sleeping Brittany, which was just as awful as every other chipmunk-related piece of media. By the time I was twelve, I’d seen a thousand beauties prick their fingers on a thousand spindles, a thousand castles swallowed by a thousand rose hedges. I still wanted more.

    I graduated high school two years early—another one of the rules for dying girls is move fast—and went straight into the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology at Ohio University. Seven semesters later I had an impractical degree, a two-hundred-page thesis on representations of disability and chronic illness in European folklore, and less than a year left to live.

    Dad would cry if he heard me say that. Mom would invent some urgent task in her flower beds, tending things that weren’t going to die on her. Charm would roll her eyes and tell me to quit being such a little bitch about it (it takes a particular kind of tough to pick the dying girl to be your best friend).

    All of them would remind me that I don’t know exactly how long I’ve got, that Generalized Roseville Malady is still largely unstudied, that new treatments are being tested as we speak, etc., etc., but the fact is that nobody with GRM has made it to twenty-two.

    Today is my twenty-first birthday.

    My relatives are all over for dinner and my grandma is drinking like a fish, if fish drank scotch, and my worst aunt is badgering Dad about crystals and alternative therapies. My cheeks hurt from fake-smiling and my poor parents are doing their very best to keep the celebration from feeling like a wake and I have never been more relieved in my short, doomed life to feel the buzz of my phone on my hip. It’s Charm, of course: happy birthday!!

    And then: meet me at the tower, princess.

    TOWERS, LIKE WICKED fairies, are pretty rare in Ohio. We mostly have pole barns and Jesus-y billboards and endless squares of soybeans.

    Roseville has a tower, though. There’s an old state penitentiary out on Route 32, abandoned in the ’60s or ’70s. Most of it is hulking brick buildings with smashed-out windows and mediocre graffiti, obviously haunted, but there’s an old watchtower standing on one corner. It should be exactly as creepy as the rest of the place, poisoned by decades of human misery and institutional injustice, but instead it looks … lost. Out of time and place, like a landlocked lighthouse. Like a fairy tale tower somehow washed up on the shores of the real world.

    It’s where I always planned to die, in my morbid preteen phase. I imagined I would dramatically rip the IVs from my veins and limp down the county road, suffocating in my own treacherous proteins, collapsing Gothic-ly and attractively just as I reached the highest room. My hair would fan into a black halo around the bloodless white of my face and whoever found me would be forced to pause and sigh at the sheer picturesque tragedy of the thing. Eat your heart out, Rackham.

    God, middle schoolers are intense. I no longer plan to make anyone discover my wasted body, because I’m not a monster, but I still visit the tower sometimes. It’s where I went after high school to ditch track practice and get high with Charm; it’s where I made out for the first time (also with Charm, before I instituted dying girl rule number #3); it’s where I go when I can’t stand to be in my own house, my own skin, for another second.

    I switch off the headlights and coast the last quarter mile down Route 32, because the old penitentiary is technically private property upon which trespassers will be shot, and park in the grass. I pop my eight o’clock handful of pills and make my way down the rutted lane that leads to the old

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