Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. This is a sort of slipstream retelling of Sleeping Beauty, in which various Beauties try to escape their fates. If you're aware of the different possible endings of Sleeping Beauty, particularly the nasty rape one (the inspiration for my own Convergence of Fairy Tales) then you'll understand why escape is a sympathetic strategy here. The two main Beauties of the novella are quite different, however. The second is pretty much the Disney archetype - tower, spindle, sleep for a hundred years and so forth. The narrator is the first. She's from our world, and is dying of an industrial disease, something which could honestly have been made a little more of, I think - had Zinnia been dying of cancer, or anything like that, there's not a whole lot that would be different. (Then again, I've a particular interest in environmental malpractice and industrial pollution, so I always want to see more exploration of that topic when it comes up. It's important, let's give it considered page space rather than make it a token sort of tragedy.)

How these two girls meet, navigate their own separate curses, and find a way to help each other is entertaining. I enjoyed the mirror aspects of their lives, and of their places in each other's fairy tale, but I have to admit that the most interesting characters for me were neither of them. Zinnia's best friend Charm, and the evil fairy doing her best to mitigate the miserable lives of her charges, were more appealing. Admittedly, it's a likeable cast of characters, so I'm interested to read the follow up. I hope the fairy's back.