100 years have passed since the last heir of Gyldan fell into eternal slumber and doomed the once-mighty kingdom into poverty and invasion. At least, that’s what the fairy tales claim. 

Corin is a jaded thief who doesn’t believe in fables, even when she searches Gyldan’s underground tunnels to find her younger sister, Elly, who ran away to find the sleeping princess in hopes of a better life. Corin’s conviction is challenged when she discovers the ruins of the ancient castle, maintained by beings from the kingdom’s golden age, who protect a hidden portal into princess Amelia’s subconscious. Following Elly’s voice, Corin jumps in the portal and seals the entry behind her.

Inside the lush world of Amelia’s dreams, the sisters reunite for a new adventure as they meet Briar Rose, Amelia’s whimsical alter ego, and Malicine, a sharp-tongued demon with a gift for magic. But as they explore ice castles, sunflower mazes, and star-filled oceans, Corin suspects Briar Rose is hiding darker secrets behind her “perfect” paradise – and that there are some things their subconscious can’t bury forever.

What if the fairy godmothers were all bitches and Maleficent was a queer badass who only says it like it is and Aurora just wanted to be left alone to frolic in the forest? Oh wait, that is just Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. But The Secret World of Briar World forces me to ponder the purpose of dropping an original everywoman protagonist into all of this, while sending all of its main characters to very dark places. Author and YouTube personality Cindy Pham says in her author’s note that the “story is inspired by [her] experience with depression and suicidal ideation,” establishing the book’s sombre tone but also the hope to be found in it from the very beginning.

The Secret World of Briar Rose’s primary POV character is Corin, a scrappy and deeply cynical young woman who has been acting as her sister Elly’s guardian and fighting tooth and nail for their survival since their parents’ deaths. But Corin’s bleakness and harsh means of making it in their war-torn and impoverished country clash with Elly’s persistently hopeful outlook, eventually driving the girl to run away. Elly wants to find and awaken the sleeping Princess Amelia, as restoring the mythically royal bloodline’s rule after 100 years will supposedly save the country from its current ruin.

Which is how Corin ends up in Amelia’s own personal otherworld, where the princess inhabits the fantastical alter ego of Briar Rose. Though the legend says that Amelia was tragically cursed, she is willingly staying in this world, with the Maleficent-analogous character Malicine also living there as her companion. The cover art and sprayed edges of this book promise something incredibly lush, yet once you get into Briar Rose’s dream world, you are still thrown by the chameleonic landscape, subtly tainted undertones of denial amid the beautiful, indulgent, whimsical surroundings. 

Briar Rose herself takes on a new form depending on which of the seasonal regions she is in: 

[In Winterland], “Pearls glistened across her cheeks like teardrops and embedded her porcelain skin, dappling around her chin and forehead. Snowdrop flowers intertwined her silver hair, spilling over a pale lace dress with nightingale embroidery and beaded feathers. Her eyes looked like sea glass, narrowed and glaring, as if Corin were an intruder that she would kill with her bow.” [In Springland, she is] “a girl with chestnut hair and a satin dress embroidered with spring flowers. Shrubs grew from her sleeves, her shoulder bows and cape made of butterflies, fluttering over the tulle. Daffodils wrapped around her head like a crown, while daisy petals pressed onto her eyelids and cheeks.”

While the text indirectly condemns this fantasy as a long-term coping mechanism, it’s best to just let it take you away. Not just visually, but logistically: for a while after Corin enters Briar Rose’s world, the magic system is a quagmire, confusing enough to make it very difficult for me to follow my own reading advice. Post a devastating revelation at the end of the second act, the unstable nature of the dream realm starts to work a lot better when Corin herself has just accepted the nonsensicalness of the whole situation. She is an Alice who just stops fighting Wonderland when it feels like there is no point anymore.

As far as the book’s “real world” goes, your instinct might be to attempt to make sense of the political backdrop, which evokes a handful of contemporary social issues. But it’s all largely handwaved to be the vehicle for what Pham told us her story was actually going to be about upfront. Unfortunately, it’s hard not to think that the book doesn’t really offer a meaningful moral about what to do when the system is broken, revolution is too dangerous, and everyone you love is gone…the ending conveniently saves the heroes from these things via, well, magic, and a political shift only slightly better than “the one true heir will solve everything.”

Yet I cannot deny that Pham gets at something painful and true with this story. Corin and Malicine have lived under horrible, desperate circumstances: Malicine was abused by their birth family, while for Corin, economic strain bleeds into how she was never prepared to be a parent, and her and Elly’s relationship may be beyond repair. Yet abandoning all hope and happiness is not going to make their lives better. In contrast, the privileged Amelia/Briar Rose has always just been burdened with a draining apathy towards life in general.

While the fairy godmothers are pretty obnoxious, they aren’t exactly wrong in assuming that someone who always lived with a clock ticking away to their 18th birthday would wish they had more time, but Amelia believes it will be a release. Pham entwines the arcs of Corin and Malicine with the simple sadness of Amelia, illustrating that depression doesn’t need to have an external cause. You can look at the fairy tale horrors surrounding the characters as the extreme representation of real depression, because everyone’s problems feel like the end of the world to them. The text even nods to a hereditary mental health condition, somewhat unique for a fantasy story.

While reading The Secret World of Briar Rose, it takes real faith to believe in the inherent love between sisters and their will to go on. One of the reasons why the characters must keep living is that you never know what joy may come your way next, which, in this story, are a few gorgeous, indefinably queer relationships. Genre tropes set up Corin and Briar Rose to be love interests, but their love story is first a platonic, deeply profound connection. The only hard evidence of it being romantic is the culmination of the story, the fruit of everything else they have been through together. They are a queerplatonic pairing bonded by pain, then a true romantic love that never was. And given the story’s more important subject matter, I admire what Pham did with them. 

Amelia and Malicine’s queerplatonic love is also delightful, as the two sort of just fell in together and then formed a lifelong, ironclad bond. Amelia and Malicine are the figures we recognize from Sleeping Beauty, while Corin is a mirror that forces them to reflect on themselves and the state of the world. With a melancholy flair to the symbols from their real lives that appear in the dream realm, Pham creates compelling mentalities for the characters, repurposing Sleeping Beauty with a loving and personal touch.

The Secret World of Briar Rose is available now – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org