Marsha's Reviews > A Spindle Splintered

The Sleeping Beauty tale is extremely polarizing. Some women love it. With its symbolism of a female who goes to sleep a girl and awakens as a woman, a female who must adjust to a world that has changed drastically since her cursed slumber and the men who impale themselves on thorns in vain attempts to rescue her (from what, exactly?), she is a field rich for the mining.

Others just hate it. If they’ve come to it through Disney, they find a generically pretty girl with Barbie blond hair and blue eyes, wasp thin waist and only 18 lines in her own film. She’s nothing special. Cinderella learns to perform household chores; Mulan fights to save her father; Snow White goes from being pampered princess to helper to seven little men; Belle sacrifices herself to rescue her father from a murderous beast; Tiana works hard to open her own restaurant. What does Aurora do except hang out in a forest with her woodland friends, prick her finger and fall asleep?

Having been afflicted with a deadly disease that kills its victims before their 22nd birthday, Zinnia Gray is determined not to wallow. But she sees her death written in her parents’s tight expressions, who have run through every option to save their daughter and are now determined to put a brave face on things. Everyone she meets in school is aware of her condition and she hates the look that states “there’s the dying girl”, as if there’s nothing else to her life except her impending death.

The one bright shining note is her best friend (okay, only friend) Charmaine Baldwin. Charm’s the kind of acerbic character a girl like Zinnia needs. She’s got a tattoo, is learned in chemistry and she refuses to let Zinnia wallow. Charm snaps at Zinnia when depression catches her off guard and stages a terrific party for her on her 21st birthday. She’s as vivid a character as Zinnia and a perfect foil.

Zinnia Gray’s sideways fall into a fairy tale world, complete with anachronistic touches, is delightfully skewed. She’s always adored the Sleeping Beauty story but not because of its doomed heroine. She saw a Sleeping Beauty tale with an illustration that showed the girl awake with blazing, defiant eyes and it struck a chord. This was one princess determined not to go gently into that good night.

What if the sleeper didn’t want to awake into the arms of an unknown prince who presumptuously claimed her as his own? What if the curse wasn’t actually a curse? What if villains aren’t so clear cut or in plain sight?

This is a feminist take on a very old story. Who else but women condemned to smothering in comas could understand what it means to be severed from their best possible selves? So we understand when Zinnia boldly calls upon other women to help her.

The author packs a lot into this slim novel and it’s rendered even more enticing by stylish, bizarre black, white and gray illustrations. Figures with displaced heads dance across the page, foliage sprawls from above, below, left and right and odd-looking beasts pop up unexpectedly. The text winds itself around these images, like thorns winding themselves up the walls of a castle.

This is an exquisite jewel box of a story and you root for Zinnia along every step of her journey.