Zinnia Gray, professional fairy-tale fixer and lapsed Sleeping Beauty, is over rescuing snoring princesses. Once you’ve rescued a dozen damsels and burned fifty spindles, once you’ve gotten drunk with twenty good fairies and made out with one too many members of the royal family, you start to wish some of these girls would just get a grip and try solving their own narrative issues.
Just when Zinnia’s beginning to think she can't handle one more princess, she glances into a mirror and sees another face looking back at her: the shockingly gorgeous face of evil, asking for her help. Because there’s more than one person trapped in a story they didn’t choose. Snow White's Evil Queen has found out how her story ends, and she's desperate for a better ending.
This novella is fun. Alix E. Harrow's A Mirror Mended is the second installment in the Fractured Fables series and is a perfect sequel to the first book, A Spindle Splintered. Years have passed since our protagonist was gifted a second chance at life, and now she's tired of the repetivity of it; she's also pulling away from her friends. Jumping into a different fairy tale than her own makes her better understand agency and helps her rewrite her narrative.
More than in the first installment, this book focuses on its critique of storytelling and villains, showing how the life of a nameless Evil Queen must have gone for her to resort to evil means. The Evil Queen, nicknamed Eva by the protagonist, is a well-rounded character that clashes well with Zinnia; her growth is believable and well-earned.
The romance between the two characters, while tender, comes a bit out of left field. Zinnia's interest is palpable, but Eva responds to the first instance of romantic feelings with shock, unaccustomed to queer desire. I would have liked a more thorough exploration of that hesitancy. But when the fireworks come, the relationship develops beautifully, with fierce moments of protectiveness.
I enjoyed the well-researched narration, touching upon different versions of the tale of Snow White. The writing is also wickedly funny, although it knows when to be more somber.
A Mirror Mended is a lovely second installment, and I can only hope it's not the final book in the series.
✨ 4 stars
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