“Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.”
Spoiler alert – Zinnia Gray is dying. It’s not really a spoiler alert, because she tells you that fact herself as the story is beginning. It does, however, set the stage for her love of Sleeping Beauty throughout her life, even though her life seems to be increasingly reaching its end.
Zinnia is part of an unfortunate group of children who were affected by an industrial accident that led to contaminated water. Think Flint, Michigan. All of these children suffer from incurable conditions and none has lived past the age of twenty-one. We meet Zinnia on her twenty-first birthday.
Zinnia outlines her rules for dying girls, including living as much life as you can in the time you have left. Zinnia finishes high school early and heads to college to become a folklore expert. Fairytales are of special interest, with Sleeping Beauty being the worst of the worst as far as the message fairytales send regarding the passivity of women who conform and submit instead of following their own dreams and how often women are treated terribly in these tales, relying on outside factors and people to define their story. Cinderella and Snow White need men to save them, the Little Mermaid literally gives up her own voice to please a man, and Sleeping Beauty? Well, “she literally sleeps through her own climax.”
Despite this, Zinnia has always identified with Sleeping Beauty, the cursed young girl destined to sleep forever unless a miracle can save her. You can understand the attraction.
Back to the story… Zinnia’s best friend, Charm, hosts a Sleeping Beauty-themed birthday party, maybe Zinnia’s last birthday ever, and goes all out, complete with a spinning wheel. (If you need a quick refresher on your fairytales, Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on a spindle and falls into a 100-year sleep in the Disney version.) Zinnia, of course, follows course, pricking her own finger on the spindle and somehow jettisons herself into an alternate reality, meeting Princess Primrose, another cursed girl who is nearing her own deadline.
Here is where you need to suspend your disbelief as we follow Zinnia into Primrose’s world, sometimes dark and sometimes comedic, and we are exposed to other versions of the Sleeping Beauty tale that aren’t so rosy and romantic as they are weaved into the narrative. It’s a retelling, yes, but it’s also a statement on how women have been pushed into roles they didn’t necessarily want and if they push back? Well, they’re the villain, the crone, the spinster, the unworthy, the difficult, the bossy…the outcast.
This is a novella, so I can’t give much more on the story without giving the whole thing away. The audiobook is less than three and a half hours, so if you need a quick fairytale retelling, this is a good one.