Fantasy book review: A spindle splintered

When Alix Harrow released her novella A Spindle Splintered (2021), I assumed I wouldn't be able to read it for a while. My e-reader is barely holding a charge these days, and I'm not sure yet what I want to replace it with. To my surprise, my public library had a ton of hard-covered novellas on the shelves. I stumbled across A Spindle Splintered while wandering through the shelves.

I nearly put the book down after the first chapter, because Harrow's writing is just too beautiful and too painful some times. I had the same issue with The 10,000 Doors of January--I had to stop reading periodically just to be able to breathe. Despite that, I did manage to read this book in one sitting.

My favorite part of this book (other than the prose that wrecked me, the way it made me think of what it means to be chronically ill and how that changes your relationships, and the way it highlighted the deep flaws in our medical system) was the pop culture references. As a rule, I don't get pop culture. My mom was too busy surviving to take us to the movies, and she didn't really like music (and my hometown public library didn't carry anything recent in either of those categories in those days). The one place we went to religiously was the library--and the references sprinkled throughout A Spindle Splintered were from books.

For once in my life, I got the joke.

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