Alix E. Harrow returns us to the world of Fractured Fables with a new adventure for the fairy tale troubleshooter and former Sleeping Beauty.
When we last saw Zinnia Grey she’d been given, well, not a cure for the genetic disease that was supposed to kill her by her 21st birthday, but definitely a stay of execution. After spending her whole life having to be careful about everything, Zinnia opted to use her extra time to travel through time and fable, rescuing as many other variations as she could of every Sleeping Beauty who was desperate to break away from their own crappy ending.
That was five years ago, and 48 different Sleeping Beauties, a veritable parade of weddings and drunken celebrations, and quite a few make-out sessions with royal family members, male and female. Zinnia isn’t sorry about any of her rescues, but she’s getting a little tired and a lot sick of all of it.
Sometimes I wake up and don’t know where or when I am, and feel all the stories blurring into a single, endless cycle of pricked fingers and doomed girls.
The latest Beauty has been rescued (this one a kind of a Telenovela version with a wicked Tia and a convenient coma and a tequila-fueled fiesta afterward), and Zinnia is just freshening up in the bathroom after yet another spur-of-the-moment one night stand. She’s getting ready to prick her finger to escape to a new story when she glances at the mirror, and instead of her own reflection she sees a beautiful woman begging for help.
It isn’t until Zinnia is yanked through the mirror and finds herself in a locked room and iron manacles that she realizes she’s not dealing with another Sleeping Beauty, she’s facing an Evil Queen and she’s somehow gotten herself trapped a different fairy tale.
I can’t stop myself from picturing the slideshow Charm would assemble for the occasion: So There’s Something Fucky Happening to the Multiverse: Ten Implausible Theories. Or maybe, So You’re a Little Bit Hot for the Villain: We’ve All Been There but This Isn’t the Time, Babe.
Book One of the Fractured Fables series was about breaking out of terrible endings, whether it was a perfectly innocent family getting cursed with a hundred-year sleep, or marriage to a charming prince that the princess has no interest in, or a lifetime of having every person you love be haunted by the ghost of your inescapable death. Every single person would love to take the reins of their own story and drive off to a happily-ever-after that’s ours, rather than what someone else has decided we’re going to have.
But imagine how much worse it would be if you’re the villain of the story, destined for a horrible ending that everyone will cheer for. The Evil Stepmother is desperate to escape her story, and to make things even more complicated she’s very up front about the fact that she’s done exactly what she’s accused of, and she’s not even a little sorry.
“Poor Snow White, so pretty, so pure.” She shakes her head, mock-pity on her face. “You think this is her story.”
The last thing Zinnia wants is to unleash a villain onto the universe, but she’s not exactly given a choice as the two of them fall through the mirror, seemingly escaping, except not really, because while they may be able to move into a Disney Technicolor castle, or a Robin McKinley forest, or a Dutch cave where the protagonist has gotten everything settled nicely thank-you-very-much, nothing has actually changed.
“Congratulations, you made it to a different world! But you’re still in the same story.”
Zinnia remains a fun and take-no-prisoners kind of protagonist, quick-thinking but in a way that tends to get her ass handed to her at least half of the time. The author plays a lot of this for humor (I love how often Zinnia and the Evil Queen keep having whispered arguments as they try to figure out what the hell they’re supposed to do next). But the story also gets surprisingly dark as they run into some of the older, less children-friendly versions of the fairy tale. The Brothers Grimm were not messing around, and their stories all come from an era where a woman’s life had generally less freedom than their fictional counterparts.
I think unwillingly of all the other roles the queen was given: the ugly princess, the barren queen, the foreign monarch. A string of women with just enough power to be hated and not quite enough to protect themselves.
Even more worrying is the fact that Zinnia keeps referring to her friend Charm – you remember Charm, from the first book – as her ex-best friend, and it’s apparently been at least six months since they last spoke. Zinnia won’t let herself think about why, but it becomes more and more clear that she’s running from something as hard as she can, and she eventually has to fact the fact that her current fairy-tale-hopping life is about as satisfying as the two decades she spent preparing for nothing except the end.
…I’ve tried just surviving. I spent twenty-one years pouring all my want and will toward it, adhering to a set of rules – move fast, go hard, don’t fall in love, try not to die – that left me with exactly one friend and zero plans.
This series is delightfully meta, diving in and out of stories and trying to survive in a metaverse where the walls between the stories are breaking down faster and faster. It’s also the product of someone who’s obviously been living and breathing fairy tales enough to learn where they come from, the way they’ve changed as civilizations around them have changed. It’s always fascinating to learn things like the origin of the phrase that traditionally wraps up a fairy tale, that one-sentence unhealthy daydream that can keep people locked into a less-than-satisfying life. And then it’s incredibly satisfying to see an author tweak that phrase just enough to give us something that could improve anyone’s story, something to live for now instead of just holding on for for that always-out-of-reach happy ending.