Five Magic Spindles is a collection of five retellings of Sleeping Beauty. They range from fairly traditional (the second one, extremely skippable) to barely recognizable as a Sleeping Beauty retelling (the first one) to somewhere in between (the rest). Sleeping Beauty is a hard fairy tale to do a good retelling of, but perhaps that’s why (other than the one that’s a very faithful retelling) these retellings ended up so incredibly goddamn cool!

Fairy tale meets dungeon crawl meets queer romance in this bizarrely adorable novella by Tamsyn Muir. The witch wants to make art, and so she locks Princess Floralinda up at the top of a tower with forty flights. She does it all quite properly, with one challenge per flight, and any prince that wants to rescue Floralinda must face all forty challenges. Unfortunately, even the first challenge is too difficult for every prince who attempts it, and Floralinda remains unrescued. Upon discovering a quite concerning diary, Floralinda decides to take matters into her own hands and attempt to escape the tower. This task would seem insurmountable for a princess, but the fairy Cobweb shows up in a storm, and together they take on the tower’s obstacles.

I dare you to read A Spindle Splintered with a dry eye for a single page (you won’t, it’s impossible). Zinnia Gray is a dying girl who’s spent her life obsessed with Sleeping Beauty because being a cursed girl seems better than being a dying girl. Alix Harrow uses a poetic, musical first-person present voice that leaves the reader heartbroken for both the protagonist and also every other character at every moment of this 128-page-long novella.

The premise is compelling - A “Peter Pan” retelling with an adult Wendy whose brothers never returned from Neverland with her - but the execution is anything but. The majority of Lost in the Never Woods takes place in the “real world,” a quiet, boring town that was disrupted several years ago when Wendy and her brothers disappeared for several months and only Wendy returned. The rest takes place in the nearby woods. None of it takes place in, you know, Neverland.