A Mirror Mended

A Mirror Mended, by Alix E. Harrow

For a short, quippy, meta novel, A MIRROR MENDED is shockingly ambitious. A good heel-face turn is nearly impossible to pull off. Harrow doesn't quite make it, but in the end the book accepts the difficulty of it by (spoiler) not quite giving the heel character the happy ending she doesn't quiiiiiite deserve. And of course neither does our plucky hero get a happy ending... but that's life.

The plot and characters of this book worked well for me. There was a little too much quippy meta wanderings, though, especially for audio consumption. It got a little hard to follow the energy of the story when the protagonist is mentally composing a paper fit for an advanced degree program in fairy tale retellings. Which is not to say that I wouldn't read that paper, in the right frame of mind. There's interesting stuff here. I just had trouble getting absorbed in it.