A Mirror Mended

About A Mirror Mended

A Mirror Mended is the second installment of Alix E. Harrow's Fractured Fables series, and it expands the premise of A Spindle Splintered in a productive direction. Zinnia Gray — still dying, still sharp, now somewhat more experienced at falling through fairy-tale-shaped holes in the universe — has made a loose career of it: she slides into Sleeping Beauty stories and tries to give the princess a better ending than the original plot provides. The Snow White story she falls into this time is different. Zinnia is summoned by the Evil Queen, not the princess. The queen is not evil in any straightforward way — she's a woman who got cast as a villain in a story she didn't write, who has been trying to survive inside it, and who needs help getting out. Zinnia, who has spent a lot of time thinking critically about what fairy tales do to women, finds herself in the uncomfortable position of recognizing that the villain might have more claim on her sympathy than the heroine. Harrow is doing something genuinely interesting here with narrative structure and sympathy. The Fractured Fables series is, at its core, an argument that the categories fairy tales assign — hero, villain, chosen one, sacrifice — are imposed structures that real people suffer under. A Mirror Mended makes that argument more complicated than its predecessor did, because the villain is not obviously redeemable and the rescue is not obviously a rescue. Zinnia's voice is one of the series' great pleasures: sardonic, specific, capable of genuine feeling underneath the deflection. Her arc across both novellas is about what it means to spend your life helping other people out of their stories while being uncertain about the shape of your own. The Snow White reworking is original without being perverse — Harrow doesn't twist the fairy tale just to be subversive; she twists it because the original raises real questions about who gets to be a victim and who gets to be saved. A Mirror Mended works best read after A Spindle Splintered, but the recaps are sufficient if you come to it first.

Tropes & Themes