Mirror+Mirror+Meredith+Hooper

[[image:mirrormirrormeredithhooper.jpg width="376" height="557" align="left"]]__Rating:__
2 Stars

__Summary:__
A retelling of the Snow White fairytale based on the historical Borgia family, Gregory Maguire embroiders the classic Snow White tale with new details. When Bianca de Nevada's father is sent off by Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia to find the Tree of Knowledge, Bianca is left alone on their estate in Montefiore, Italy with only Lucrezia to run the estate. Although she is quite adept at navigating the social scene, children are another realm altogether. While admiring her own beauty in the mirror that Don Vincente, Bianca's father, had found in the lake, Lucrezia realizes Bianca is becoming more beautiful than her. However, that fact does not hit her until her brother Cesare, implied lover of Lucrezia, becomes interested in Bianca and flat-out tells Lucrezia that Bianca is prettier than her. At this time, Lucrezia decides to take things into her own hands. She hires a huntsman to kill Bianca, but he is the son of Bianca's old wet nurse and lets her go out of compassion. Bianca finds herself in the dwarves' cottage and faints, for it seems the stones are talking. Several years go by and she wakes, and these talking stones are the dwarves. Finally, Lucrezia gets wind that Bianca survived and comes to kill her in the guise of an old crone. Meanwhile, Don Vincente is journeying back to his home in possession of the Tree of Knowledge. Will Lucrezia manage to kill Bianca and take Montefiore for her own? Or will this retelling of the classic Snow White fairytale stick to the traditional happy ending?

__Review____:__
I enjoyed the different retelling of the Snow White tale, since the new plotline was inventive yet familiar. I also liked the dwarves- I could imagine little stones shaping themselves into dwarves based on the imagination! However, I did not like the flow of the book. It started off very slowly, with lots of character development. While that's all fine and good, I wanted to get into the interesting stuff. I also don't really enjoy books with a multitude of cursing in it, which this one did. Finally, I did not like how the chapters narrated by the dwarves used the chapter title as part of the first sentence of the chapter. Usually I do not read chapter headings, but in this book I was forced to interrupt my reading for the chapter titles, otherwise the chapter would not make sense. I personally would not recommend this book to someone mostly because I disagree with the cursing in it, but I also thought that it was not a terribly gripping plotline.