Since the day she was born, Zinnia Gray has been living on borrowed time thanks to chemical pollution's impact on her mother's pregnancy.
Despite all the doctors and lawyers and drugs and treatments, her twenty-first birthday is more than likely to be her last, the protein
buildup in her organs approaching terminal levels. Her best friend Charm had decided that Zinnia will go out with the best birthday party
ever. In an old abandoned tower (once a prison watchtower), she throws a Sleeping Beauty-themed bash, complete with an authentic
spinning wheel; Zinnia always related to the princess who lived her whole life under an unavoidable curse, and even got a degree studying
fairy tales to understand its roots. It was on a lark that, at midnight, she deliberately pricked herself on the spindle... and found
herself whisked away, to another tower and another wheel, where another princess is about to make her own fateful mistake.
Princess Primrose has lived with a fairy curse since her christening, and was about to fulfill it when Zinnia turned up and stopped her.
Now, she can marry the prince and have a happily-ever-after... but the prince looks more arrogant and conniving than handsome, and Primrose
doesn't seem happy at all - and not just because she still feels the curse pulling her toward the tower and the spindle and one hundred
years of enchanted slumber. Zinnia, however, has had enough of fatalism. Surely, in this world of wishes and magic and fairies, she can
find a way to avoid her own death sentence, and help Primrose avoid hers. But Zinnia, of all people, should know that it's never that
simple to thwart fate - and many versions of the Sleeping Beauty tale are not about princesses getting happily-ever-after endings,
but princesses finding tragedy and death.
Review
Talk about a turnaround from yesterday's book, Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars. From a story where women are weak and
almost inhuman entities whose only desire is to belong to a man, it's a long way forward and up to A Spindle Splintered, which is
all about women taking back their power and autonomy.
Zinnia's entire life has been lived under the cloud of her impending death, and though she's told herself time and again that she is ready,
that she has done all she possibly could and has accepted her fate - has even lived her life by a set of rules she came up with for dying
people, to prevent her getting too invested in her very brief stay on Earth - the moment she has even the vaguest, wildest chance at more
time or a cure, she hardly wastes a moment before chasing it. At first, she sees the princess Primrose as a fragile victim, a fairy tale
figure in a fairy tale world that defies everything she knows about logic and reality and yet persists in existing (in a strange sort of
quantum reality where Zinnia still gets cell service, and can briefly text her panicking friend Charm back in Ohio), but as the tale goes
on it becomes clear that there's more to her than is initially apparent, and they have more in common than Zinnia first realized.
Determined to lift the curse, they set out to find the wicked fairy responsible, but what they learn turns everything they thought they
knew on its ear. Throughout the story, under Zinnia's snarky modern voice and the increasingly dark overtones of the fairy tale world
she's plunged into, is a theme of feminism, how women are stripped of choices and that very stripping is romanticized and glamorized until
even the women come to embrace it (most of them, at least)... and how those who resist are vilified and punished. The harder Zinnia and
Primrose try to forge their own happy endings, the more the worlds push back, but Zinnia's not about to give up, not when she literally
has nothing to lose.
From the start, the voice pulled me in, and the tale kept moving until almost the very end, which seemed a little drawn out. The whole
makes for an enjoyable and thought-provoking examination of a classic story whose roots are far darker than many want to realize.
Five years ago, Zinnia Gray was dying when her best friend, Charmaine, threw her a fairy tale themed birthday party, centered on
Zinnia's favorite story, Sleeping Beauty. Pricking her finger on the spindle, Zinnia fell into a swoon... and into a story,
following a call for help from a princess under a very familiar curse. Since then, Zinnia's bounced around the multiverse of stories,
saving other princesses (and princes, and more) and arranging more happily-ever-afters - for everyone but herself. Every time she
returns to Earth, the disease that was going to kill her recurs, a reminder that no matter how many fairy tales she fixes, her own
last page is still waiting for her, and it's anything but happy.
Then Zinnia sees a face in the mirror, another call for help from across the multiverse of tales. Only there is no magic mirror in
any iteration of the Sleeping Beauty story (as she should know, having a degree in fairy tale studies and more than enough
practical experience living it time and again in its many iterations). But there is one in Snow White - and it belongs to
the Evil Queen.
The Evil Queen who has just asked for help to escape her own terrible ending.
On the one hand, Zinnia's not in the habit of helping out villains. On the other, she may not have a choice if she ever wants to see
her real home and real family and friends again... even if it means she'll have to confront the very thing she herself has been
avoiding for five years, the final pages of her own life.
Review
Like the first installment of the series, A Mirror Mended opens fast with plenty of action, spunk, and heart, as well as
plenty of darkness and doom just beneath the surface. Zinnia convinces herself the multiverse needs her more than mundane Earth, but
at what point does selfless heroism become selfish avoidance, and when does interfering in other people's stories and worlds do more
harm than good? Already she's lost her best friend over her constant world-hopping, which she uses to avoid difficult conversations
and hard realities. The Evil Queen starts out every inch the cold, menacing witch every reader is familiar with, willing to go to any
length to save her own skin from the dark ending she brought upon herself... but, as always, there's more to her story than was
written. Hard as Zinnia tries to condemn her and leave her to her fate, much as she tries to tell herself that the woman's just plain
evil and evil people always deserve their gruesome endings, she can't help listening, especially when the Queen's plight strikes too
close to home. When she learns that her world-hopping has been having unintended consequences, she finally has to look herself in the
mirror and ask what she's becoming, what kind of story she's writing for her own life - and if, rather than being the selfless and
blameless heroine of dozens of fairy tales, she has more in common with the queen than she wants to admit. As in the first story,
Zinnia wrestles with an unfair hand dealt by an unfair life and her own looming mortality, even as she delves into the deeper
symbolism and darkness of familiar (and often watered-down) stories that reveal so much about the societies that tell them. It wavers
a bit at first, as Zinnia leans hard into her self-assigned role as the innocent protagonist out to right wrongs and give other
people the happy endings she knows she'll never have herself, but once the story digs into the Evil Queen's struggle it rises easily
to the level of the first story. Also like the first one, the ending's not the simple sweetness-and-sunshine fairy tale conclusion
some might have offered, but a perfect and bittersweet finale. Especially given my iffy reading luck this month, I enjoyed it all
the more.
In ages past, women were witches, keepers of those special words and ways and will that could heal or harm, mend or break,
charm or curse. But when women have power, always there are men who fear and hate them for it. And so the men came, with their
iron and their torches, burning the words and erasing the ways and breaking the wills, until even the great bastion Avalon was
nothing but ash and ruin, conquered by Saint George. But always, when something is shattered, some fragments remain, secrets
hidden in nursery rhymes and childhood games and details of needlework and other places men never think to work, passed
between mother and daughter who nevertheless remain fearful always of iron and torch as they whisper. Though goodly folk
remain ever-vigilant, they believe the war against wicked witchery to be all but over, with women well and truly in their
place under men's boot heels. But nothing is lost that cannot again be found, and not all are content with mere whispers in
shadows...
In 1893 New Salem, as suffragists agitate to grant women voting rights (and others, naturally, rail against granting them even
that much power), the three estranged Eastwood sisters are about to change the course of witchcraft and history. Agnes Amaranth
left rural Crow County years ago and scrapes by as a mill worker, enduring horrendous conditions and deprivations. Beatrice
Belladonna, left broken and bent by years in an institution, toils quietly in a library and tries her best to avoid notice.
James Juniper, half-feral youngest of the three, has come seeking her kin after they abandoned her to their monstrous father.
Though they may not yet realize it, the three are bound by more than blood, but by threads of power and of fate. For the
Eastwood women all carry with them words and ways taught them by their late grandmother, and the moment of their reunion is
marked by an impossible vision: the Tower of Avalon, long thought lost, returning for a handful of heartbeats right in the
middle of New Salem. The sisters are going to need all the magic they can gather, and all the allies they can find, to survive
what's ahead: not just the possible return of witchcraft to the world, but the return of the witches' oldest and most brutal
of enemies.
Review
It's a sad truth that history repeats itself, which is why The Once and Future Witches, set in an alternate
history and with magic as a clear metaphor for empowerment (not just of women, but also of lower classes and other cultures
and races), is both timeless and timely in its often-brutal depiction of the downtrodden struggling to rise, the powerful
stomping them down, and the general public - which often, erroneously, thinks of itself as outside of the struggle (or simply
decides it's better to go along to get along) - all too easily harnessed by tethers of fear and manufactured outrage to
enable monsters and excuse atrocities, even at the cost of their own freedoms and futures.
From the beginning, the reader is introduced to three very different Eastwood sisters living very different lives. They have
been divided by bitter resentments and misunderstandings, divides further exacerbated by a world that actively encourages
division among peers and would-be allies; a divided and squabbling underclass is a powerless underclass. Indeed, the
divisions that keep people from coming together against mutual enemies are a strong undercurrent to the whole story. Even
the suffragists fight among themselves over policy and goals. They all have been taught to hate and distrust each other,
and even themselves, in ways they may not even recognize but which preemptively sabotage many of their efforts at rising up,
or even simply surviving, in a society that makes no bones about wanting them and all their kind shackled or dead (or both).
Some even cling all the harder to the people who hate and hurt them the most, as if serving the beast will keep it from
biting as hard (or simply being brainwashed into believing the bites are what they are owed). The main characters are not
magically immune to this conditioning, either. Even headstrong James Juniper has been twisted and (literally) crippled by
the world, her own anger and thirst for vengeance becoming as much a liability as a strength. It takes everyone leaning on
each other, compensating for the blind spots, weaknesses, and scars of their companions, for any lasting change to be
possible... and even when it's possible, there is no clear or guaranteed path to success.
Their chief enemy, a politician named Gideon Hill who is building a cult following and populist movement founded on fear
of/hatred of witches and women (and minorities, and workers who dare believe they deserve some manner of rights), is far
more dangerous than even his inflammatory rhetoric indicates. It's going to take more than mere magic to defeat him and
bring about a better future, but building bridges between historically estranged groups is perilous work in and of itself,
especially when the knowledge they're sharing is so risky: the magic systems here are as simple as they are mysterious
and diverse, snippets of verse or song or dance with ingredients scrounged from everyday items or herbals and all driven
by depth of need and force of emotion. This, too, the sharing of diverse and hoarded spellcraft between women (and even
between the women and downtrodden men, whose magic has long been considered separate from the "wicked" workings of
girls), is not so easy a process as some stories would have one believe. There are many believable setbacks, a few
betrayals and failures of courage, and times when it seems like a lost cause altogether. Still, giving up is not an
option, and when faced with certain Hell if one quits and even a slim chance of success for persevering, the choice is
clear, if never easy. Starting fairly fast, the book moves relentlessly forward, if not always at a breakneck pace;
there is breathing room as it fleshes out the characters, their relationships, and their worlds, interspersed with
nursery tales and folklore that often holds hints and clues if one knows how to look at them. Each chapter starts with
snippets of spells, foreshadowing the theme of the coming passage and further filling out the magic system and the
alternate world. While there is plenty of darkness, though, there are moments of joy and wonder and even levity. The
whole builds to a climax that is just as explosive and harrowing as the tale and characters deserve, one not without
sacrifices and does not pull its punches or put a glossy, artificial golden sheen on things.
It has been some time since I've awarded a five-star rating, but this one earned it handily. The Once and Future
Witches is a book that manages to be both brutally honest and yet hopeful. In fiction, at least, hope for a
better future is possible...
