Is "Happily Ever After" a destination, a phantom or beside the point of life? MY TWO AND ONLY by CARLA MALDEN, THE SPINDLE by ASHLEY GRIFFIN, tales of transformation for adults

Is “Happily Ever After” a destination, a phantom or beside the point of life?  Carla Malden’s My Two and Only (Rare Bird Books)and Ashley Griffin’s The Spindle  (Oaklea Books) address this question from points of view human and otherworldly. 

Carla Malden’s novel is a deceptively quiet book about adults in Los Angeles’ middle class, distanced from the media drumbeats of apocalypse–climate disaster, homelessness, nuclear war. (There is no mention of AI).  The environment, business are topics but the real concern is family–what makes one?  How do you keep the heart, that most essential pulse of people’s lives, beating when your most essential human dies? 

Dysfunction here is less about psychology, than the crucial adjustment a human being makes when their “One and Only” dies. When it happens in an accident both everyday and strange, it leaves much to the imagination. For twelve years Charlotte lives with the “what ifs.” Yet she’s able to be a mom for her adult children, suffering their own grief yet moving on. Charlotte channels her own grief into a career redoing rooms for people. Her interior design focuses not just on practicality, but the emotional quest of her clients for a place fully their own.

Fulfillling these quests is fun and satisfying, though Charlotte herself lives in limbo in her “starter” house with memories of the life that died with her husband. Grief has an austere beauty. She feels it’s enough. Yet when she visits her mother, Alice, in her 90s in a nursing home, she wonders what makes a life?  Alice’s present and past are a continuum of people, places and feelings–constantly shifting. But with her daughter, there’s a thread of comfort; a reminder who she was where. Time, as Charlotte discovers, is a porous thing. There’s stability in memory.

Until she finds herself crying in a Jack in the Box. A guy pulls in and buys her one milkshake, then another. My Two and Only looks at a widow’s dilemma. Ostensibly, she’s complete with children and a career she loves. She’s declined fix-ups (What’s the point after the incredible happiness she had with her husband?) Her new friend first amuses her with stories of his dating life. They’re still friends, when he presents her with a blue tiffany box. She relegates the box to a drawer, though not her friend. He’s got a place in her heart.

As life happens, her work begins to mirror her emotional queries. She gets a commission to redo an intimate room for a famed female entrepreneur, a widow. This singular woman, renowned for her taste, culture and backing of pivotal endeavors, has chosen Charlotte. Then the dream job takes a quixotic turn, and her question remains–what’s of value in a life?  

The ends of her days and the beginnings, are marked by Alice visits. Her mother’s lapses and clarity underscore the landmarks of self, family, love. Shockingly, Charlotte is forced from her careful cocoon into terrible unexpected events. Living moment to moment, she finds a lifeline and is transformed. In a magical sense, she becomes a person she has never been. 

 The Spindle by Ashley Griffin looks at the classic fairytale Sleeping Beauty from the viewpoint of Nor, the dark fairy of life and death.  Unlike Wicked,  a retelling of The Wizard of Oz from the Witch’s point of view, The Spindle repurposes a classic less for psychological insight than a reimagining of the classical role of  nature in “magical” stories. Like Greek mythology, mysterious nature in The Spindle is the source of otherworldly creatures and events, here the realm of fairies and their role of fairies on the planet. 

This version of Sleeping Beauty reveals how the curse on the infant Rose’s birthday party was not due to a bad fairy’s pique over not being invited. That story, made up for human consumption, covers the fact that the fairies had to compensate for a huge mistake. Responsibility for the world looms large in Griffin’s amusingly coherent universe. Fairies, as well as humans, suffer from their weaknesses. Sure they’re immortal and know more than us about reality, but where does it get them?  They are, after all, an endangered species, who exist on human belief.  

This elegant reimagining follows the course of the original with details that fill-out the gaps left by the authors, the brothers Grimm. For instance, imagine the consequences of a fateful curse on one’s life as an infant? Logic might suggest isolation was a means to protect her life.  And, as tradition dictates servants over mothers, servants are rotated and friends rarely repeat in Rose’s childhood. The one exception (and only important human addition to the story) is  Arthur, the Palace Gardner’s helper, who brings  flowers and news, as well as games and books to amuse her. Like a hot house flower, this Rose develops unusual intelligence and intuition. Arthur both admires her and feels it’s his duty to protect her from a curiosity as huge as his own.

Yet he’s drawn to a certain place in the woods, where he meets two men living in an odd dwelling in a tree, They know things about him and show him curiosities, like a whole orchestra in a box. He also tells Rose about a strange building on the edge of the castle grounds that shouldn’t be there.  And, as the story goes, on her 15th birthday, she will find that building and the room, where Nor must put her to sleep for a hundred years–so the world can be right. All the fault of her fool sister, playing the “good fairy” again!

And what happens to Rose and Arthur?  Reading to find out was really fun. I recommend this book to anyone who loves fairytales. It’s a fine antidote to Netflix, especially after a round of board books to get your little beauty to sleep. 

S.W.