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.

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.

princesses grow up to be queens.

Strangers tend to imagine that sick people are looking for ways to die with dignity, but mostly we’re looking for ways to live.

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