Mini Review – A Spindle Splintered

From Goodreads:

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.

First of all this book as a physical object is beautiful, its filled with cool and interesting silhouette cameo style artwork that scrawls across every page. This adds so much to the experience of reading as you look at all the details in the artwork.

The story itself is a really cool idea, a ‘spiderverse’/multiverse style sleeping beauty retelling that interweaves all kinds of different versions of the stories and how they have been told and retold in various incarnations. It made for a really sweet story that just the right level of girl power, just the right level of bittersweet happy ending.

There was a lot of detail, care and thought put into the discussion of the various different versions of Sleeping Beauty the history and the interpretations of the story. This made it really interesting. It did lack a little bit of the Harrow magic when it came to the worldbuilding. I wish that had been expanded just a bit more so we could dive into the magical realms a bit more as that is really something Alix E. Harrow does best. But for anyone that has loved fairy tales, the classics or the Disney retellings I think you would enjoy this one!