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A Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow

Title: A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables #2)

Author: Alix E. Harrow

Publisher: Tordotcom 2022

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 144

Rating: 4/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Summer TBR

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?

I really enjoyed the first book in their series and was looking forward to the second. This one definitely delivers on it’s promise of a feminist reexamination This time we get to Zinnia deal with a story different from her own Sleeping Beauty story, I loved her uneasy alliance with the Queen as they explore a variety of Snow White stories. This is a very slim novella, but takes the reader on a high-speed journey right from the first page. I really enjoyed the conclusion to this story and really came to love the Queen.

Fractured Fables

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