This author never disappoints me, and I especially love her adaptations of fairy tales and classic literature. HEMLOCK & SILVER (sic) is based on “Snow White,” with elements of Alice’s trip through the looking glass. It involves a possibly evil queen, a poisoned princess, enchanted sleep (apparently, anyway), apples, creepy mirrors, portal fantasy, a doppelganger dimension, and a talking cat. The opening sentence is irresistible: “I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife.” Narrator/protagonist Anja experiments on herself with carefully measured doses of poisons to study their attributes and discover antidotes. She also uses roosters as experimental subjects, since chicken breeders often have a surplus of them. And she keeps a snake, which she describes as more of a colleague than a pet, for the useful qualities of its venom. The king’s unheralded arrival in her solitary workshop throws her into confusion. After all, she isn’t nobility, only a prosperous merchant’s daughter. The monarch killed his queen when he caught her in the act of cutting out their daughter’s heart. Now his surviving daughter, twelve-year-old Snow, suffers from a mysterious chronic illness. Grief and depression? Some kind of food or drink sickening her? Or poison? Having heard of Anja’s expertise in the latter field, the king asks her to tackle the problem because she has no court entanglements.
A royal request, however affably presented, amounts to a command, so despite her trepidation Anja packs up, snake and rooster in tow, to travel to the palace. How will the king react if she fails to solve the case? Suppose Snow really is being poisoned and Anja becomes a target, if the culprit sees through her guise of being the princess’s new natural history tutor? Whom can she trust? It quickly becomes clear that Snow isn’t deliberately making herself sick, yet Anja believes she knows more than she’s admitting. The girl’s volatile adolescent moods complicate the investigation. Anja methodically sets up procedures for ruling out possible causes, employing the scientific method she excels at and enjoys. On the other hand, she finds attendance at court dinners an ordeal. Dealing with people has always been hard for her, especially since her typical conversation focuses on poisonous and venomous plants and animals along with other bizarre natural phenomena that fascinate her. According to the Healer who’d been her beloved mentor, most members of their profession regard cases as people with problems; Anja, although she’s sincerely driven to find cures, sees a case as a problem with a person inconveniently attached.
When she discovers the strange mirrors made of sand from the late queen’s native country, Anja is baffled. She doesn’t believe in magic. Therefore, she addresses the conundrum of the mirrors and the other world inside them with the same experimental rigor she applies to poisons. She gets help from one of the local bodyguards assigned to her as well as a one-eyed, talking cat who has no patience with answering tedious human questions. The solution to the mystery and the connection between the mirror realm and Snow’s illness will astonish most readers as thoroughly as it does Anja. Although still unwilling to believe in magic, she keeps an open mind. Between her lack of confidence outside the boundaries of her profession and her bodyguard’s taciturn manner, it takes her a while to begin to recognize their mutual attraction. Its gradual development from friendship to passion is charmingly awkward. The supercilious, enigmatic feline is also a constant delight. (According to the afterword, by the way, he’s based on the author’s own one-eyed cat.) As usual with Kingfisher’s first-person narrators, Anja is an entertaining character whose combined intelligence and vulnerability can’t fail to engage the reader’s sympathy. I'm especially taken with her because I suspect she's meant to be at least slightly neurodivergent.
Margaret L. Carter
Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.
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