A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)

by Alix E. Harrow

Romantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; vanilla girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White. Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.

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.

know they promoted a reductive vision of women’s agency that privileged traditionally male-coded forms of power, but let’s not pretend girls with swords don’t get shit done.)

Unless we change them. Unless we grab our narratives by the ear and drag them kicking and screaming toward better endings. Maybe the universe doesn’t naturally bend toward justice either; maybe it’s only the weight of hands and hearts pulling it true, inch by stubborn inch.

I’m just a dying girl, and the last rule for dying girls, the one we never say out loud, is try not to die.

“You are accustomed to thinking of fairy tales as make-believe.” Dr. Bastille looked straight at me as she said it, her face somehow both searing and compassionate. “But they have only ever been mirrors.”

But suddenly I saw her as my mere reflection: a girl with a shitty story. A girl whose choices were stolen from her.

I gathered power around myself until I could turn blades into feathers and huts into castles, could read the past in tea leaves and the future in the stars.”

In that moment he reminds me of Charm’s parents, or maybe my own: a person whose love is a burdensome thing, a weight dragging always at your ankles.

We fall asleep curled toward one another like a pair of parentheses, like bookends on either side of the same shitty book.

“in a universe of infinite realities, there’s no such thing as fiction.”

I’ve always resented people for trying to save me, but maybe this is how it works, maybe we save one another.

(she agrees that the 2005 Pride and Prejudice is the superior version, because it is).

YES YES YES

“Okay.” Charm turns and kisses me once, hard, on the top of my head. “I hope you find your happily ever after, or whatever.” “Already did,” I say, and it’s possible that my voice is a little gluey, too. “I’m just looking for a better once upon a time.”