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Louissa Brandt
Comp 1 Pd. 8
Mrs. Cramer
15 November 2019

How Fairytales Hold You Like A Breath

Imagine that for your entire life you’re not allowed to leave your house. The color in

people’s faces drain if they even touch you. Hearing the words “useless” and “fragile” are a daily

occurrence. Besides all of this, you’re rich. You get anything you could possible ever dream of

having. You’re a fairytale princess living in a fairytale. The only problem is that you live in a

mob family and your income is from doing illegal surgeries on patients that need organs. Penny

Landlow is a modern fairytale princess. Throughout Hold Me Like A Breath, the constant

mention and reminder of fairytales makes life seem so much better than it is. The story slowly

takes away the feeling of fairytales and makes the reader forget what a fairytale even was.

Tiffany Schmidt’s Hold Me Like A Breath relates to a fairytale by genre, but reminds the reader

that life is not at all idyllic.

The unidyllic fairytale, The Princess and the Pea, inspired Tiffany Schmidt to write Hold

Me Like A Breath. In the author’s notes (pg 387-388), Schmidt says how much she loved

fairytales as a child and sees Hold Me Like a Breath as a modern continuation of said fairytale.

The fact that the Princess’s ability to bruise was such an important part of the character, Schmidt

turned her main character, Penny, into the same thing; thus, Penny bruises extremely easily

making her the “princess” in the “fairytale”, The Princess and the Pea. This concept pushes

toward the genre of the story to be a partial fairytale. There are other ideas and concepts
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throughout the story that a child would find in their favorite bedtime story. Some of these include

love at first sight, running away together into the sunset, having everything being handed to you,

and true love’s first kiss. Ideas like these all fit into the genre to classify something as a fairytale.

These scenarios and the good moral theme to teach readers that life isn’t like a storybook label

the book as a modern fairytale.

In the genre of fairytales, there can be several themes. There can be several themes taken

from Hold Me Like A Breath, but life is not idyllic is one of the more prominent ones. One of the

main characters, Garrett Ward, calls Penny a princess from the beginning of the book when he

first appears to the end when he almost dies (first time he calls her a princess is page 11 and the

last time he does is page 361). Other characters use phrases that would be said to a royal to

Penny. For instance, her personal doctor calls her to a throne when she needs a blood transfusion,

both her doctor and Garret say “my lady” in reference to Penny, and every character that knows

of Penny’s condition do everything and anything for her. All these things would have the average

person calling her life “perfect”, but all of it gets ripped away from her when the Wards betray

her family and kill them. She is saved and taken to New York City, but she must do everything

for herself. Cook, clean, and all other normal, daily activities, but she never had to do any of

them before. While she does some of these tasks, she even remembers that she would be scolded

and get in trouble for talking to strangers and not having rounded corners on the doors of the

apartment because of how sheltered she was. The love story trope of “love at first sight” happens

between Penny and another character, Char (Zhu Ming), and they instantly fall in love (all

throughout chapter 12). This reminds the reader of the fairytale feelings and aspects, but at the

same time reminding the reader that Penny could be killed at any moment and is in constant

danger. She lies to Char about who she is for most of the story to protect him, until she finds out
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that he is a Zhu, someone she should be weary of. Penny goes from living a perfect life to living

a nightmare.

Hold Me Like A Breath is a modern fairytale about love and betrayal. Tiffany Schmidt

shows the reader that life can be perfect, happy, sunshine, rainbows and what you make it, but

she also shows how cruel and dark the world truly is. The reoccurrence of fairytale troops and

happiness makes the story feel like the ones the reader would’ve heard from their parents at

bedtime. However, the harsh, cruel reality of death and murder makes the story not seem like an

average bedtime story, but the piece of adult literature it is. Hold Me Like A Breath is a great

young adult fairytale that shows the reader how good and cruel the world can be, but it is not

idyllic.
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Work Cited

Schmidt, Tiffany. Hold Me Like A Breath. New York, New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.