Review - A Mirror Mended

Title

A Mirror Mended

Author

Alix E Harrow

Series

Fractured Tales #2

Book #1 is A Spindle Splintered (a Sleeping Beauty retelling)

Content Warning

Implied cannibalism of children, kidnapping of a child, terminal illness, LGBTQ+ rep, fade-to-black sex scenes, non-consensual kiss

Goodreads 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?

(Goodreads)

Story Review

***** (5 stars out of 5)

I loved this book. I love that it has a bi/pansexual main character, that it has lesbian best friends, and that the main character finally lets herself feel something romantic for another person. As a lover of all things retellings, a book about retellings is just amazing. After about five years of skipping from one sleeping beauty retelling to another, Zinnia is just about to head home to her best friend and her best friend's wife, when she gets pulled into the story of Snow White by the evil queen herself. A queen who is desperate to escape her own death. Together they now hop from one Snow White retelling to the next trying to figure out how to save the queen.

*Spoiler Warning*

Do not read beyond this point if you have not read the book and you care about spoilers.

Retelling

This story is a retelling because it turns the evil stepmother into one of the main characters and makes her likable. Otherwise it's based on the Grimm's version of Snow White. The story starts shortly before Snow White's wedding.

Story Motifs

• Queen wishes for a child - Not present, but implied since the Grimm's fairy tale is mentioned
• Three drops of blood - Zinnia sees a drop of blood in fresh snow while traveling through the multiverse from the Sleeping Beauty stories to the Snow White stories
• White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony - one of the alternate stories the woman is described as having hair the color of coal and that her lips aren't read as blood and her skin can't be compared to snow, the evil Snow White is described as having white skin and lips that are a bright, arterial red
• Snow White - Eva shows Zinnia the Grimm's fairytale book and opens it to the page showing a sleeping Snow White with seven dwarves around the bed and the title "Little Snow-White" on the next page, Zinnia and Eva also run into an evil version of Snow White
• Mother dies - implied since the king remarries
• King - Snow White's dad is the king and after he dies the stepmother rules, Eva admits she killed him because he was displeased about her not giving him an heir
• Stepmother/Evil Queen - the stepmother/evil queen is one of our main characters in this book and she doesn't have a name besides "Your Majesty" or "My Queen" until Zinnia gives her one, Eva. She started as an ugly second daughter with uncanny power (Cinderella?) and then a foreign bride without any heirs
• Magic Mirror - Eva has a magic mirror that she uses to pull Zinnia into her universe and they use it to travel between different retellings of Snow White, it is described as a small silver hand mirror that does not seem to be reflecting the room around it, Eva says it shows the truth and that she made it
• Jealousy - Zinnia mentions that Snow White is lying in a glass coffin because of Eva's malice and vanity, not the reason why Eva wanted Snow White out of the way though, she wanted her gone because Snow White was the only legitimate heir to the throne and would have wanted her stepmother to step down as regent
• Huntsman to kill Snow White - the huntsman has a generic handsomeness like a lesser Hemsworth (Snow White and the Huntsman movie anyone) and has been tasked with keeping Zinnia in Eva's work room, his name is Berthold and he was Eva's lover
• Heart and liver as proof of death - Zinnia sees a heart in a box on her trip through the multiverse as well, Eva says she asked for the lungs and liver as proof of Snow White's death
• Huntsman lets Snow White live - Berthold betrayed Eva and let Snow White live, Eva didn't want Snow White dead otherwise she'd have just killed her
• Huntsman kills boar for proof - 
• Cottage of the seven dwarves - when Zinnia first arrives she says there's probably seven dwarves living deep in the woods, one of the stories takes place in a cave with more than a dozen men, Zinnia says she remembers stories where Snow White is taken in by robbers or brigands instead of dwarves, one story has seven ogres
• Snow White convinces them to let her stay - in one story the Snow White marries them
• Laces - Eva has a long green ribbon which wraps itself around Zinnia's neck and would have put her into an enchanted slumber, which she later says is a bodice lace
• Poisoned comb - Zinnia mentions the poisoned comb during her quick synopsis of the Grimm's fairy tale, one story has a hunched woman offering a comb to a little girl
• Poisoned apple - there's an apple sitting on the counter behind Eva when Zinnia first arrives that is described as glossy, round, and poisonously red
• Glass coffin - Zinnia asks Eva how long Snow White has been in her glass coffin and Eva says "a long time", the first alternate reality they land in they see a young girl in a glass coffin, there's also an alternate story in the future with cold metal coffins
• Prince - Zinnia says that the prince falls in love with a dead child in the woods
• Snow White revives - the princess in the cave admits that a prince rescued her from an enchanted sleep, but she turned him down because she already has 17 husbands
• Wedding - Zinnia says that the prince and Snow White marry and live happily ever after, Eva is invited to attend the wedding and the messenger brings along quite a few guardsmen to escort Eva to the wedding
• Evil Queen is punished/killed - Eva quotes the story from the Grimm's fairy tale book as she explains what will happen to her at Snow White's wedding about being made to dance in red-hot shoes until she falls over dead
• Glowing hot shoes - Eva quotes the story about the iron shoes being put in burning coal

Retelling Review

***** (5 stars out of 5)

All the elements are there or implied to be there in the sense that the story up until Zinnia lands in it is progressing exactly like the Grimm's version of the fairy tale. What I love is the fact that it turns the evil stepmother into a person who isn't as evil as she seems, she's just scared of losing the power to make determinations about her own life and has gone about maintaining that power in sometimes questionable ways. I also like that she turns into the actual hero in a battle against an evil version of Snow White, thereby turning the story completely on its head. This novella is so meta, Zinnia even mentions the Neil Gaiman short story where Snow White is a vampire.