“I wish I knew how the Queen was still alive, when the real one’s dead. I mean she told me how she ‘woke up,’ but it sounded like a fairy tale.” ​ ​
page 282, Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
“After all this, you don’t believe in fairy tales?”
Table of Contents
Preamble
Hemlock & Silver is another lexi aka newlynova book club pick. This time around, I put in my library hold for the book early and I was pleasantly surprised to see the hold come in earlier than I expected. Which means, that this review will be published right after the review for last month’s lexi book club pick.
This is my second T. Kingfisher novel, I had previously read Paladin’s Grace by her back in February 2024 and I remember enjoying my time with that book so I was cautiously optimistic about reading this book.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
One of the first pieces of media I remember interacting with as a young child was the animated Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). More specifically, I watched a VHS copy of it because it was the late 90s and VHS tapes were how we watched movies at home.
I don’t have much of a recollection of the movie itself other than the basic premise of the Snow White story which itself is based on a story by the Brothers Grimm. I have never been particularly enamoured with any Disney movie and as such I don’t really have any nostalgia for these characters or stories. So going into Hemlock & Silver, I was mostly intrigued to see what T. Kingfisher take on the tale would be.
This book is marketed as a “dark re-imagining of Snow White” to which my initial response was that the original story is already quite a dark one. That said, in this book T. Kingfisher applies an even darker tone to the story. The story is stripped of the typical Disney whimsy, namely there are no dwarfs and the story is more about the evil queen, the mirror and the poisoned apples than it is about the princess herself.
The story is told from the perspective of Anja, a healer who specializes in poisons. And I do mean specializes, Anja’s special interest very much is in poisons and the book often alludes to her not having any of the bedside manner that other healers have. Anja comes off as very autistic coded (complimentary) in the way she is described as a young child more interested in researching poisons than anything else.
What I liked less was the book’s slow start, the first 50% of the book is focused on telling us Anja’s backstory and setting up the premise of the story. I thought this bit of the story went on a bit too long and I was bored by it. There are also significant chunks of the book which mostly amounts to Anja’s inner monologues and thoughts and while I appreciate bits of that, it got to be a tad too much. I like Anja as a character but reading this much of a single characters inner thoughts made me lose interest in the overarching narrative for a while.
Once the book does get started, it improves significantly. After the 50% mark, the action picks up and the story becomes more about solving the mystery at the heart of the story: the illness of the princess Snow. Without spoiling the story, I very much liked the way the mirror, the apples and the evil queen elements from the original story were re-imagined in a novel and intriguing way that still kept the general vibes of the original story.
I also enjoyed the romance subplot in this book between Anja and her bodyguard Javier. It was cute. It reminded me a lot of a similar romantic dynamic between two of the main characters from Paladin’s Grace which also involved a bodyguard character as the romantic interest. Mayhaps T. Kingfisher has a thing for romances involving bodyguards.
Also there is a talking cat character who is appropriately disdainful of the humans around him and that makes me like this book a lot more. Overall, this book was alright, the slow start partially spoiled my experience but the second half combined with Anja and Grayling the talking cat was enough to save this book from being a below average fantasy read.
Conclusions
I am not someone who generally speaking enjoys a re-imagining of a fairy tale. But if T. Kingfisher is going to write more of these in the future I am open to giving them a try, especially if they change the story in novel ways while keeping the tone of the original. In some ways I like her version of the story more than the original though at this point that is most likely because I haven’t thought about the Snow White story since I was a very young child.
I am curious what others in lexi’s book club think of this book, especially if they had similar memories of watching the Disney movie in their childhood. What about you dear reader of this review? Feel free to send me a message with your thoughts about Snow White using the brand spanking new contact form on this site.
I’ll leave y’all with a quote from the Acknowledgements section of this book that I liked.
As for the rest of the book–well, years ago now, (though long after Sergei’s adoption) I read a wonderful book called The Artifice of Beauty by Sally Pointer and immediately thought, “Oh, I gotta write a book about this,” And I did, and the book was called Paladin’s Grace and mostly it’s about perfume, but poison did come up.
Acknowledgements, Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
In the course of researching that book. I read another wonderful book called The Royal Art of Poison by Eleanor Herman and thought, “Oh, I gotta write a book about this.”
This is basically my creative process in a nutshell. (I have not quite figured out the fantasy romance that revolves around medieval sewer design but I’ll get there). So Hemlock came about mostly because I find mirrors at night deeply creepy and because I have a one-eyed gray cat who believes that he is a god.
T. Kingfisher seems cool. That’s all from me, see y’all in the next one.
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