A Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow – Review

Published: June 14, 2022

Publisher: Tordotcom

Series: Fractured Fables #2

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 144 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 4.0/5.0

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:
A Mirror Mended is the next installment in USA Today bestselling author Alix E. Harrow’s Fractured Fables series.

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. She wants Zinnia to help her before it’s too late for everyone. Will Zinnia accept the Queen’s poisonous request and save them both from the hot-iron shoes that wait for them, or will she try another path?

Years after the events of A Spindle Splintered, Zinnia Gray is still interrupting fairytales to save all the variations of Sleeping Beauty. Her friends are moving on with their life and mostly just keep a spare room for Zinnia for the brief times when she pops out of an alternate universe long enough to stop in.What Zinnia hasn’t quite had the heart (or time) to tell them, is that she’s still dying but she’s not keeping up with her doctor’s appointments or her medications. She’s still been granted years past her original expiration date, so she’s out to do some good. Or maybe she’s just avoiding the subject by staying away.

This time, the Sleeping Beauty story is rather different and next thing you know, Zinnia’s touched a mirror and gets yanked through into none other than a Snow White tale. She was entirely unprepared for PLOT TWIST and she’s also been tied up by the evil queen. You see, the nameless evil queen ended up with Zinnia’s book of fairytales (multiversal disturbances) and has seen how her story ends – it’s bad and she wants out and Zinnia’s going to help her find a way. This is something Zinnia understands to a disturbing degree because she’s wanted nothing more than to find a way out of her own tragic story.

This is the fairytale version of Multiverse of Madness and I loved it. Perhaps not quite as much as the first book, which was shockingly good, but A Mirror Mended was an epically fun (and also kind of disturbing) exploration of the Snow White variations. The thing is, I don’t usually like novellas this much because I feel they leave me wanting for more, but both of these so far have been the perfect length with just the right amount of detail, emotion, and characterization packed in. I don’t know for sure if there will be a third book, but there’s certainly room for more stories and more fairytale worldhopping.