The only part of the story of Snow White that matters is the apple and the mirror, right?
That’s what T. Kingfisher allegedly told her editor when she pitched this book.
While I knew going in that this book was based on Snow White, I also knew from experience that Kingfisher likes to take a lot of liberties with the fairy tales she uses for inspiration, and this one is no different.
I kept looking for comparisons to the version of Snow White I know, and while I found the important ones, doing so didn’t detract from my ability to find my footing in the world Kingfisher built.
The main character (and one of my favorite characters,) is a woman named Anja who specializes in poisons and venoms. And she’s very particular throughout the book about the difference: poison is ingested, whereas venom is injected via fangs or other sharp objects.
At the time of the book, she is in her mid-thirties and has been able to live as the local authority on poisons and venoms because she her father is a wealthy merchant, so she doesn’t need to get married or work to gain financial security. She just lives in a small house on her father’s estate.
That is until the king shows up one day to say he thinks someone is poisoning his daughter. He’s had several physicians examine her, but they were all stumped. Anja’s reputation precedes her, so he has come to ask her to help.
But of course Anja knows, no matter how politely he “asks,” she doesn’t really have the opportunity to turn him down. He’s the king.
She’s afraid of what the consequences will be if she fails and the princess, Snow, dies. But again, she doesn’t really have a choice.
Also nothing is said about the other physicians who already failed getting executed or mysteriously disappearing, so she might be exaggerating slightly when she worries about the consequences of failing.
The king and his court are getting ready to head out to his summer palace, so Anja only has a few days to prepare for the journey. In the meantime she’s assigned a pair of guards to follow her around. She assumes they’re keeping an eye on her to make sure she’s not conspiring with anyone to commit any nefarious deeds. It’s not until she gets exhasperated with them that someone points out to her they are there to protect her. If someone is poisoning the princess, then they probably won’t like having Anja poking around, which means they’ll have a reason to take her out.
She finds that very unsettling, but manages to get on with the business of trying to find out what’s making the princess sick.
She notes her symptoms and everything she eats, but nothing seems familiar.
Finally she happens to see Snow sneaking an apple.
The apple looks a little shiny, but it mostly looks like any other apple. She runs all the tests on it she can and finally eats a slice herself, but nothing happens.
Later, back in her bedroom, she loses her balance and falls into the mirror hanging on the wall across from her bed. The mirror doesn’t break. Instead, she discovers a whole new world on the other side of the mirror.
And it’s not limited to just her mirror. She can travel between rooms by going into the mirror world in one room and exiting through a mirror in another room.
This opens up a whole world of possibilities for a poisoner to access Snow and/or the kitchens.
It also provides the potential for scientific discovery, and I love that Anja is such a scientist that her first thought is of scientific discovery and publishing papers on this new world she’s found.
Fortunately, she’s also a pragmatist and realizes that, if she starts rambling about a mirror world, she’ll be locked up in an asylum.
So she has to tread carefully.
No sooner does she realize that than one of her guards enters her room just as she’s stepping out of the mirror.
She tries to show him the mirror world, but his hand stops at the glass.
Turns out you need to have eaten something from the mirror world to be able to enter it.
The apple Snow snuck is a mirror apple. She’s been eating them so she can venture into the mirror world to try to find her sister.
I should back up.
In addition to telling Anja he thinks someone is poisoning his daughter, the king also confesses to killing his wife because he found her cutting out their daughter’s heart.
In this version of the story, Snow had a sister named Rose, but their mother cut her heart out.
Despite the queen’s death, the mirror queen is still alive and well and determined to get to the land of the living.
Eventually, Anja finds out what really happened: The queen, alone in a new home with her new husband, turned to her mirror for a friend. She somehow managed to feed her reflection her own blood, which brought her to life.
But the Mirror Queen wanted more. She wanted to leave the mirror world behind and live in the world of light and color.
But an object or person taken from the mirror world crumbles to dust eventually. The only way for a mirror person to leave the mirror world and live is by eating the heart of the person they’re reflecting.
So the Mirror Queen starts by luring Rose into the mirror world, murdering her, cutting out her heart, and feeding it to Mirror Rose.
When the queen realizes what happened, she cut out Mirror Rose’s heart.
Of course the king doesn’t know about the mirror realm. He just thinks his wife went mad.
Snow doesn’t know enough about the mirror world to figure out what happened. She knows the girl murdered was Mirror Rose, but the Mirror Queen told her Rose is still alive in the mirror realm, and if Snow does as she’s told, she can save her sister.
Which is why she’s been eating enough mirror apples to make herself sick. Yes, they provide access to the mirror world, but they also induce illness after a while.
The more you eat, the longer you can stay in the mirror world, but you’ll also get sicker.
So Anja has to convince Snow to stop eating mirror apples and also defeat the Mirror Queen.
This book was so much fun! It’s packed with action and a fair amount of humor.
I also appreciate the Mirror Queen as an interesting take on the evil stepmother. I think this retelling had more in common with the original than A Sorceress Comes to Call had with The Goose Girl.
I highly recommend this book if you need a fun romp.