Only the dying girls like Sleeping Beauty…
We’re thrilled to reveal the cover for Alix E. Harrow’s A Spindle Splintered, a genre-bending twist on the classic fairy tale—arriving October 5th from Tordotcom Publishing.
“Sleeping Beauty is the worst fairy tale, pretty much any way you slice it. It’s aimless and amoral and chauvinist as shit. Even among the other nerds who majored in folklore, Sleeping Beauty is nobody’s favorite. The romantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; basic girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White. Only the dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.”
It’s Zinnia Gray’s twenty-first birthday, which is an extra-special occasion, because it’s the last she’ll ever have. When she was young, an industrial accident left Zinnia with a rare condition. Not much is known about her illness, but the main fact for Zinnia is that no one who has it has lived to twenty-two.
Her best friend is intent on making Zin’s last birthday special with a full sleeping beauty experience, complete with a tower and a spinning wheel. But when Zinnia pricks her finger, she founds herself cast into another world, with another sleeping beauty, just as desperate to escape her fate.
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A Spindle Splintered
Author Alix E. Harrow had this to say about the cover:
“Look: David Curtis and the Tordotcom team did magic. This cover is everything I hope the story itself is: thorned and layered, sharp and bright. It’s familiar—you know that pricked finger, of course, and haven’t you seen those silhouettes before? In a childhood book, perhaps?—but not imitative. It says once upon a time, but it also says, buckle up, kids. It’s exactly, exactly right.”
Praise for A Spindle Splintered:
“A vivid, subversive and feminist reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, where implacable destiny is no match for courage, sisterhood, stubbornness and a good working knowledge of fairy tales.”—Katherine Arden, bestselling author of the Winternight trilogy
“Like Into the Spider-Verse for Disney princesses, A Spindle Splintered is a delightful mash-up featuring Alix E. Harrow’s trademark beautiful prose and whip-smart characters. Both emotionally touching and side-splittingly funny, Harrow weaves a gripping narrative that bridges the gap between fairy tale tropes and the sci-fi multiverse. Like the best fairy tales, it’s as unique as it is memorable.”—Mike Chen, author of Here and Now and Then
“In this enchanting and devastatingly poignant novella the constructs of the fairytales we know and love are broken wide open, exposing their raw and often tragic origins. A wonderfully imaginative, and Queer as hell, tale for those who who wish to be the authors of their own stories.” —Kalynn Bayron, author of Cinderella is Dead
“What I love about Alix Harrow’s work is that her stories are clearly written by someone who loves and knows stories, featuring characters who also love and know stories. This is a self-aware, empowered riff on Sleeping Beauty that manages to be thrilling, funny, smart, and sweet.” —Sarah Pinsker, Nebula Award-winning author of A Song for a New Day
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A former academic and adjunct, Alix E. Harrow is a Hugo-award winning writer living in Kentucky with her husband and their two semi-feral kids. She is the author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, and various short fiction. Find her @AlixEHarrow on Twitter.
