A Story Musing: A Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow

 

A Mirror Mended

by Alix E. Harrow

Our book club theme this past month was “A Fairy Tale Retelling.” Alix Harrow has been one of my favorite writers of the past few years with books like The Ten Thousand Doors of January and The Once and Future Witches. Harrow’s writing is vivid with detail and energy. Her heroine’s have a great amount of agency in affecting how the story moves forward. Things don’t just happen to them, they make them happen.

A Mirror Mended is the continuation of an LGBTQ retelling of fairy tales that began with A Spindle Splintered. “Zinnia Gray has always been fascinated by Sleeping Beauty because she has a mystery illness. No one who has it has survived past their 21st birthday. Her best friend creates a Sleeping Beauty themed party for her on her 21st birthday. Of course, her story doesn’t end there, and Zinnia finds herself in a fight, not only for her life, but other sleeping beauties as well. I can’t recommend this one enough. It’s short and sweet, and beautiful and courageous.” https://storymusing.blogspot.com/2022/06/reading-lgbtq-books.html

This book picks up the story from A Spindle Splintered. Zinnia is able to jump from one dimension to another, and different versions of fairytales, through mirrors, to help people in other fairytales escape the doomed narrative.

There’s a certain aspect to this that reminds me of the funny space adventure movies I’ve seen where the hero or heroine is jumping from one adventure to another. She’s a swashbuckling heroine from my perspective, told in the first person with a strong sense of voice.

“You might think interdimensional travel is difficult or frightening, but it’s usually not that bad.” But this time is much worse than usual. “Maybe my conviction that my organs are turning themselves inside out is just a really shitty hallucination.”

This time Zinnia makes contact with yet another girl for help, but it turns out to be the evil queen. However, the evil queen isn’t quite as evil as the storytellers would have you believe, and Zinnia falls for the Evil Queen, who she dubs Eva.

This actually seems to be more of a Little Red Riding Hood story with a particularly horrific bend. But, again, this is not your usual Red, and there’s a science fiction feel there too.

As always, the writing is vivid with details, funny, and thought provoking. It’s not your typical fairy tale though it does retain some elements, like a happy ending, of a kind. I highly recommend.

A Merry Month of May Multitude of Book Musings (Too much?)

 

This month I’m taking a page from some friends and sharing what I’ve been reading, what I liked and didn’t like about the books, and any musings about them. I guess I’ve hit a few genres this past month.

What I’ve been reading - 

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow – This book brings together a wide variety of elements in a single masterful alternate timeline historical novel. The three Eastwood sisters represent ancient archetypes of mother, maiden, and crone. Agnes Amaranth is a single mother to be, working in a sweatshop, who falls in love with a man who has used his own limited witchcraft to advocate for worker’s rights. Beatrice Belladonna is a librarian who, far from a spinster yet, finds romance with a female journalist, if she can trust herself. James Juniper is a young maiden with a deadly secret. The three find each other again and themselves embroiled in the fight for the woman’s right to vote and to practice witchcraft, after fleeing their father’s farm. I’ve read everything else written by this author to date and just love her style and depth. I highly recommend this book, without reservation.

The Vanishing Type by Ellery Adams – I love this series for so many reasons, not the least of which is because I love books in general. As a librarian, reading a mystery series where the main character is a former librarian turned bookseller who adores books and recommending them to patrons in her store, is just my idea of heaven. She mentions so many books that I recognize, and so many I don’t, that even the non-mystery portion of the story is fascinating. I also adore how she often finds books to help people with troubles in their life, something called bibliotherapy. With this story, Adams builds layer upon layer of mystery into the story. Nora is the owner of Miracle books, while her friends from the Secret, Book, and Scone Society include Hester, Estella, and June. They’ve come to trust and rely on each other. They do so again as Hester’s secret about the baby she gave up for adoption comes out into the open just as her boyfriend proposes. It’s a bumpy ride but Adams keeps us on the rails.

The Nobel Lecture in Literature 1993 by Toni Morrison – This lecture begins with Morrison relating a folk tale that she has heard in numerous cultures, about young people challenging an old blind person and that wise person putting them in their place. But then she extends the tale, asking, what if the wise person and the young entered a dialog to better understand each other – how much more could come of it? I had the sense that I would need to read it again and again to find the meaning within it. The second part was a simple acceptance speech of the award and thoroughly inspiring to me because it spoke about the writers of the future. Perfect for any aspiring writers.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler – I picked this book up thinking that the title indicated a comforting read. For some reason, the description didn’t disabuse me of the notion. I started reading and it was intriguing, if a bit lackluster. After a while, something reminded me of another book I’d read and I realized I’d read one other book by this author and didn’t care for it. I hate to put a book down and kept reading, soon finding that this book was really about one of the most dysfunctional families I’ve ever read about. The writing is interesting, it draws you on, your mouth drops open on a regular basis at the things people do. It’s not my cup of tea but the book is well written. If you like a slice of life about dysfunctional families, then this book is for you. I found it . . . unsatisfying.

The Taming of the Few: Guardians of the PHAE Book 1 by Rowan Dillon – Though this is a first urban fantasy for this author, it is not her first book. I admit that she is a member of my writer’s group and I have enjoyed her historical fantasy stories for years. The characters in this tale are thoroughly entertaining, from irascible Max with his Vietnam era PTSD and ability to talk to the wind, to swim coach Anna’s growing ability to convince the water to do her bidding, as iridescent scales slowly cover her arms. It seems a shift in the magnetic poles has caused magic to come to the surface in many people. These latent abilities have stirred fear in some and there is brewing resentment as factions move toward unrest and armed conflicts. I’m thoroughly enjoying the tale, though I’m only 30% of the way in.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

 

The Ten Thousand Doors of January 

by Alix E. Harrow

I’m not even sure where to start with this book — it’s so big and full of story.

I suppose we should start with January, so named by her mother for the god Janus, who looks both forward and backward.

“You don’t know a thing about me; you can’t see me sitting at this yellow-wood desk, the salt-sweet breeze riffling these pages like a reader looking for her bookmark.”

When the story opens, she seems like a normal little girl, though out of place in this time period and circumstance.

“I wondered if Africans counted as colored in London, and then I wondered if I did, and felt a little shiver of longing. To be part of some larger flock, to not be stared at, to know my place precisely. Being “a perfectly unique specimen” is lonely, it turns out.”

January lives in a manor house with a rich man for a guardian while her father searches the world for artifacts for him. It’s a bit sad, but there is so much more to the story, and as it unfolds, we are taking on a very rich and full journey.

“When I was seven, I found a Door . . . at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.”

There may not be ten thousand doors in this story, but there are a great many. There are also a great many misperceptions and the author is masterful in painting rich pictures that do not give us more information than we need to know at that point in the plot. The writing is beautiful in the pictures it presents and the words chosen.

January has a governess, Miss Wilda who is a bit stodgy, and a friend from the local grocer’s, Samuel Zappia, though she isn’t supposed to spend time associating with him. He still manages to slip her stories to read. He also presents her with her best friend, a puppy she names Sinbad. This dog is just a dog in this novel, but also all of the best things a dog can be, a best friend and protector.

January finds a book in a chest, which she presumes was left there for her by her guardian, which sets her on a journey as it tells the story of Miss Adelaide Lee Larson and her explorations through Doors.

“I wanted to run away and keep running until I was out of this sad, ugly fairy tale. There’s only one way to run away from your own story, and that’s to sneak into someone else’s. I unwedged the leather-bound book from beneath my mattress and breathed in the ink-and-adventure smell of it.”

As I said, there are many Doors in this story, and just as you think you have a handle on what is happening, you step through a new one into something that builds a new story onto the one you are reading.

“…there are these places—sort of thinned-out places, hard to see unless you’re doing a certain kind of looking—where you can go to somewhere else. All kinds of somewhere elses, some of them packed full of magic. And they always leak, so all you have to do is follow the stories.”

A fantastical journey I hope you will take.