“A brilliant achievement.”
—Boston Herald
“Entertaining…profound….A novel for adults that unearths our buried fascination with the primal fears and truths fairy tales contain.”
—Christian Science Monitor
Gregory Maguire, the acclaimed author who re-imagined a darker, more dangerous Land of Oz in his New York Times bestselling series The Wicked Years, offers a brilliant reinvention of the timeless Snow White fairy tale: Mirror Mirror. Setting his story amid the cultural, political and artistic whirlwind of Renaissance Italy—and casting the notorious Lucrezia Borgia as the Evil Queen—Maguire and Mirror Mirror will enthrall a wide array of book lovers ranging from adult fans of Harry Potter to readers of the sophisticated stories of Angela Carter.
At the turn of the quattrocento, when the mysteries of the new world threaten the belief systems of the old, a girl with hair as black as a raven's wing, and skin as white as snow, comes of age. The Papal States are ravaged by marauding forces of condottieri, Savaronola is burned at the stake, and the famous Borgia family recipe for poison has to be located in the Vatican files.
A Snow White story of affecting poetry and romance, Mirror Mirror constitutes the world of the Renaissance as a troubled and magical time in which Vatican corruption, Atlantic exploration and conquest, and the secrets husbanded in Byzantine monasteries come to bear on the life of Bianca Nevada. This abandoned girl of Tuscany has had the misfortune to fall under the charge of one of history's most mysterious villainesses, Donna Lucrezia of the Borgias. It's all here: why the eighth dwarf left his brothers, why the hunter spared Bianca's life, and what happened to the deer who gave her heart to be brought as proof of the girl's murder...The novel continues in the spellbinding tradition of Maguire's earlier novels, as Bianca Nevada comes out of the shadows, to ask of the reader: Well? Who is the fairest of us all?
