How to love each other properly, in ways that turn our love into a key instead of a cage. And when I thought about Charm, I thought about love-the people we love and the people who love us and how important it is to reach across the silent gulfs that keep us apart, to show each other our woundedness, our brokenness, our bruised but still-beating hearts. I thought about stories a lot too-the stories we are thrust into and desperately hope for a way out of, the stories we fear might unfold without us when we’re not looking, and the stories that are sealed in us, coiled tight in our guts, waiting to unspool. I fell asleep thinking of this novella, wondering about fate and curses and the shapes of the invisible cages around us. Because it’s not only the dying girls who like Sleeping Beauty-it’s also the girls who are so unbearably desperate to live.
In these pages are stories about girls with starved hearts who learn to draw power from worlds that wish them dead but which incorrectly anticipated their sheer covetousness for life, their wild hunger for more than: more than the shitty handsome prince and the shitty luck and the shitty story. She fills her female characters with agency and flips the fairytale narrative of disempowerment and dependence on its head. In this novella, Harrow manages to reinvent the seductive whimsy and archetypal resonance of fairytales with depth and tenderness and intelligence. So I don't want to surrender too much in the way of a summary, but I will say this: I went into this novella with nothing but those words- spider-verse meets Sleeping Beauty-and my experience of reading it was better for it.
Many and fierce delights, and terrors too. When I picked up A Spindle Splintered, it was for the indulgence of a fun and short story that reimagines (to borrow some of the author’s words) "the spider-verse but with sleeping beauties", but I found much more than I bargained for. Harrow is one of my auto-buy authors, and her debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January-a book about stories and doors and how, sometimes, the two are interchangeable-is one my heart books.
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