Zinnia Gray has been waiting to die practically her entire life. Her parents and her best friend Charm surround her with love, but also fretful worrying. The weight of the reality of the illness destined to kill her is ever more present as she turns 21. No one with this disease has made it past that age. But she deserves an excellent birthday party, right? For what’s almost certainly her last one, Charm pulls out all the stops. It’s a sleeping beauty-themed affair, held in a tower with a spinning wheel. The pull of some stories is too strong to avoid. Zinnia pricks her finger and is suddenly part of a fractured fairy tale that’s not just hers, but belongs to many sleeping beauties. Together, maybe they can break free of their old stories and wake up to a different reality.

Zinnia Gray burst out of her own version of Sleeping Beauty, where she was destined to die from a mysterious illness in our world by age 22, and into a fairy tale multiverse filled with Sleeping Beauties. Now she helps rescue others like—and very unlike—herself. A feat she first accomplished with her best friend Charm and other unlikely princesses who also didn’t want to prick their fingers and die young at her side. Problem is, it turns out hopping from Sleeping Beauty variation to variation is starting to get, well…boring. Not only that, she’s estranged from Charm and the fabric of the multiverse seems to be fraying. Fairy tales are mixing with one another in strange ways. When a fierce and beguiling evil stepmother with a magic mirror snares Zinnia, eager to escape her own version of Snow White, it begins to change everything Zinnia has believed about villains and protagonists—and, quite possibly, her own story. On the run in the multiverse with this maybe-not-entirely-evil villain who is definitely smoking hot, she also begins to see this might be the end…and to ask the question, can happy ever afters exist?