Some fairy tales get retold with a wink and a modern one-liner. Cindy Pham’s debut novel does something riskier: it cracks open “Sleeping Beauty” and pours something much heavier inside. The result is currently a #1 New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller, and it earns that spot by refusing to play its premise for comfort.
The setup starts small and personal before it turns cosmic. Corin, a hardened young thief scraping by in the war-ravaged kingdom of Gyldan, has spent years playing parent to her younger sister Elly after their own parents died. Elly still believes in the old legend of a princess sleeping beneath the ruined castle, cursed for a hundred years, whose waking might somehow set their broken country right. When Elly runs off to find her, Corin follows into the tunnels beneath Gyldan and stumbles through a hidden portal into the princess’s own subconscious. There, Amelia exists as her dream-world alter ego, Briar Rose, alongside Malicine, a sharp-tongued demon companion who reads as this story’s answer to Maleficent. What follows alternates between Corin and Elly’s grim reality and a shifting dreamscape of ice castles, sunflower mazes, and star-filled oceans, each one gorgeous and just slightly wrong.
Pham, better known to many readers as a YouTube book creator before this debut, writes the dream world with a level of sensory detail that critics have singled out as the book’s strongest asset. Briar Rose physically transforms with each region she inhabits, and the prose lingers on those transformations the way a stage designer lingers on costume changes. More striking is what the book is actually about underneath the fantasy trappings: Pham has said the story grew out of her own experience with depression and suicidal ideation, and that honesty shows in how the characters process grief, guilt, and the temptation to simply stop fighting. It also carries a quietly drawn queer romance between Corin and Briar Rose that develops out of friendship rather than instant attraction, which several reviewers have called the emotional heart of the book.
Critics have been largely won over, with trade reviewers awarding starred notices for the way the novel handles heavy material without turning maudlin, while cautioning that it isn’t a light read and isn’t built for a tidy happy ending. Some genre reviewers have pushed back a little on the dream world’s internal logic, which gets genuinely disorienting in the middle stretch before the story regains its footing, and on a real-world political backdrop that gestures at bigger ideas than it ultimately resolves. Neither complaint has slowed its climb up three separate bestseller lists.
What lingers after closing the book isn’t the plot mechanics of the curse but the smaller, sadder truths tucked inside them: that some people carry despair for no single dramatic reason, and that showing up for the people you love is its own kind of magic. Readers drawn to fairy tale retellings that actually risk something will find this one worth the ache. Just don’t go in expecting a bedtime story.
As an Amazon Associate, VIRA Broadcasting earns from qualifying purchases.