Review: Hemlock & Silver

Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

T. Kingfisher's (aka Ursula Vernon) books vary from outright horror to fairy-tale-retellings. This book falls into the latter category: the author's spin on Snow White, minus the seven dwarves.

(Thankfully. This is not a happy, sing-song world, and the dwarves would definitely not have fit.)

Our protagonist and narrator, Anja, is a Healer--sort of; it's an honorary title granted her only because of her obsession with, and expertise in neutralizing, poisons. In fact, as the book opens, Anja has just injected herself with chime-adder venom, which greatly increases heart rate and to which she has built up an immunity over the years. The King of the realm chooses that moment to step into Anja's shop-cum-laboratory. He confesses that he killed his wife, the Queen, because the Queen was in turn in the middle of slaughtering one of their daughters. The remaining daughter, the white-haired Snow, has been in declining health for some time, and the King thinks she is being poisoned. He asks Anja to accompany him back to the palace and expose the poisoner.

This is a request, or rather, command, Anja cannot refuse. So she comes to the palace to solve the mystery, and is plunged into a world of secrets and mirrors that lead to other dimensions where doppelgangers exist. Said mirror realms include duplicates of Snow's (supposedly) deceased sister and the Queen herself, as well as the most terrifying doppelgangers of all: the mirror-gelds, creatures born of the body fragments captured by the mirrors and assembled into a horrifying Frankenstein's monster.

It was a mirror-geld. Dozens of times larger than the one I'd seen before, a thicket of arms and grasping hands. The ones at the bottom had palms flat against the ground, like feet. The passage we were in was only about four feet wide, but it was at least twelve feet high, and the mirror-geld more than filled it. It looked squashed against the sides,and I saw more hands braced against the walls.

"Oh. Shit," Javier said, forming each word clearly and distinctly.

The wall of hands parted vertically, like mandibles opening, revealing dozens of faces. Only a few were intact. The rest had been pieced inexpertly together, broken mouths fitted against bridgeless noses, skewed and mismatched eyes, all of them wedged against each other like bits of shattered pottery reassembled by a madman.

The author has created some disturbing characters in her books, but I think this is by far the creepiest. (John Carpenter would be proud.) Yet even the mirror-geld has a character arc: it ends up assisting Anja and her guard Javier to escape the mirror-realm. But both of them end up returning, following Snow, who has declared war on the Mirror Queen and disappeared into her realm to destroy her.

Anja and Javier are the sort of mature, sensible protagonists I enjoy so much in Kingfisher's books: they are not kids (Anja is thirty-five). They have sufficient life experience to cope with what is being thrown at them, and tackle their problems and crises in a pragmatic matter. Anja, ever the scientist, has difficulty at first coping with the Mirror Realm and its inhabitants: she keeps asking questions and is thrilled by the discoveries she is making, even if she is simultaneously horrified by them. This is a big part of what attracts Javier to her. Their romance is also mature, and understated--it doesn't overwhelm what else is going on, and there are no explicit sex scenes.

Finally, there is a cynical, snarky, talking gray mirror-cat who might also be a mirror-god. Grayling is a MacGuffin of sorts, albeit a far more cranky one. This book is altogether delightful, and I'm sure there are many more fairy tales Kingfisher can deconstruct and rebuild. I'm looking forward to whatever she does next.

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