A review by booksthatburn
A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow

Did not finish book. Stopped at 15%.
It opens by saying in the first few pages: 
“Sleeping Beauty is pretty much the worst fairy tale, any way you slice it. It’s aimless and amoral and chauvinist as shit. It’s the fairy tale that feminist scholars cite when they want to talk about women’s passivity in historical narratives. Even among the other nerds who majored in folklore, Sleeping Beauty is nobody’s favorite. Romantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; vanilla girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White. Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.”

The MC is dying of an illness which apparently no one survives past age 22, she's 21 when the book opens.  Her main personality traits are that she's dying, she has a best friend, and she seems simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by Sleeping Beauty as a story.

She oscillates between obsessively talking about how Sleeping Beauty is a garbage fairy tale and how she's dying just like sleeping beauty. It feels like someone turned their rant about how they hate this story into a retelling of it, but forgot to take the literal text of the rant out of the story. Huge sections of it are the MC talking about the flaws in the fairy tale. I wanted something that took the material and transformed it by rearranging it somehow, something that used the critiques to make the author's idea of a different/better story. Instead this book feels like a hate-write of the fairy tale, and I'm not invested enough to finish what would be a hate-read by the end, so I'm stopping.
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