A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)

by Alix E. Harrow

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.

THE THING ABOUT bad ideas is that they’re contagious.

I don’t know about the moral arc of the universe, but our arcs sure as hell don’t bend toward justice.

I used to see Sleeping Beauty as my wildest, most aspirational fantasy—a dying girl who didn’t die, a tragedy turned into a romance. But suddenly I saw her as my mere reflection: a girl with a shitty story. A girl whose choices were stolen from her.

I wanted to save us all from our stories, but I should have known better than anybody: there are worse endings than sleeping for a hundred years.

Apparently fairy tales are flexible about gender roles.

A cursed girl sleeping in a tower; an heir to a throne bending to kiss her. And if the heir was a princess instead of a prince, and if it’s more like awkward sexual tension between them than true love, well, stories are told all sorts of ways, aren’t they?

I can’t speak, can’t breathe, can hardly think around the bonfire of my own desire, twenty-one years of suppressed hunger for more: more life, more time, more everything. For the first time in my life I let myself believe I might, somehow, be cured.