Romantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; vanilla girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White.
Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.
Alix E. Harrow is up for two Hugo awards this year, adding to a long list of nominations for her novels and short stories. In her Hugo-nominated novella this year, young Zinnia Grey was born with a genetic time-bomb that no one survives to their twenty-second year. And she’s just turned twenty-one.
Even at six years old, Zinnia knew to fake enthusiasm to spare the feelings of her devoted parents who try to give their daughter everything she wants, and who can’t quite hide the overwhelming sadness in their eyes. But one thing Zinnia didn’t have to fake was the instant connection she felt with the title character the first time someone gave her a copy of Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty (the one with the gorgeous Arthur Rackham illustrations.) The image of the cursed princess lit a permanent fire in the little girl who’d already decided that the best she can hope for is a beautiful death.
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.
I have to wonder if the author has an experience with someone close to her dying, because she skillfully illustrates the nasty catch-22 of a terminal illness. No one would want to go through that alone, having to count down the days while no one cares if they live or die. But at the same time, knowing that your life has an expiration date means that your loved ones are effectively being held hostage to the disease. For Zinnia at least, the fact that her parents are already grieving her eventual death – or pouring money and resources and time into grasping at even a shred of hope of a cure – means she has to spend her short life being endlessly patient and brave and comforting instead of just, you know, living.
It’s a grim situation, one that’s trained Zinnia to avoid as much love and romance as possible, and I was impressed again and again with how the author phrases the no-nonsense Zinnia’s ongoing monologue at just how grim it is.
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.
Fortunately Zinnia has a best friend in the tattooed and take-no-prisoners Charm, who sees Zinnia as a person and not just someone to be pitied and/or rescued. The Sleeping-Beauty-themed birthday party in the old tower at the abandoned prison is exactly what Zinnia wanted, at least until it gets late and the guests start getting drunkenly maudlin, and Zinnia accepts a dare to go prick her finger on the spindle of the spinning wheel Charm found at the local thrift store.
And that’s when things get weird.
I start to type back an apology then pause, wondering about data rates between Ohio and wherever the hell I am and how exactly I have a cell signal, before that wild hysteria bubbles over. I write sorry babe. got spider-verse-ed into a fairy tale.
I love love love a good re-told fairy tale, but what the author has done here is slightly more complicated than showing Sleeping Beauty’s story from the point of view of the cook or the King’s assistant. I don’t want to give too much away, but the Princess Primrose that Zinnia meets when she’s unexpectedly dragged into a fantasy is one of a long line of desperately unhappy young women who have had all their choices taken away, to the point that living their entire lives under the shadow of a curse is actually less bad than what they’d have otherwise.
There’s some ugliness here, the unflinching reality of having to live with something that’s inevitable, the polar opposites of feeling like love is a crushing burden, and having to fulfill a duty to people who only see you as a possession. But there’s also a roomful of roses (two, actually), and a cottage with the kind of kitchen-witch aesthetic I love, and the hilarious back-and-forth dialog between two people who are so close they don’t have any forbidden topics (“…why are your eyes closed?” “I’m praying for your amyloidosis to flare up and end my pain.” “Okay, fuck you?”).
The happily-ever-after was nothing that I was expecting, but it does have a princess being swept off her feet by the most unlikely knight, and Zinnia learning that trying to barricade herself off from love makes about as much sense as burning every spinning wheel in the land in the hope that a curse can have a loophole.