SRC | Week 7

#11 Mirror, Mirror by Gregory Maguire: Our story is set on a family farm in Tuscany where a seven year old "Snow White" in the form of Bianca and her father Don Vincente de Nevada live. Early on in the book, Vicente has found a mirror in a lake on his estate, but how it got there unknown. Soon after, Cesare and Lucrezia arrive, needing the isolation of the Nevada estate for their own purposes. Cesare also has a use for Vicente, and offers him a choice...he can either join Cesare's army and face certain death, or he can go on a quest for him, a quest to find three apples, but not just any apples, these apples are from the Tree of Knowledge...you know, Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve. Having no choice but to accept the quest, Bianca is left in the care of her father's farm staff and the infamous Lucrezia Borgia, Cesare's sister.

As the years tick by Lucrezia becomes less and less enthused about Bianca and eventually hires a hunter to kill her. But the hunter doesn’t kill her, bless his tender heart, he takes her deep into the woods instead and then he kills a deer and takes the heart back to Lucrezia as proof that the girl is dead. Meanwhile, Bianca falls into a deep sleep in the woods and is taken in by six unusual characters, who as you’ve undoubtedly guessed by now, are dwarves. But where is the seventh dwarf? The missing dwarf was the strange creature that had observed Vincente's discovery of the mirror (that he and the other dwarves had created) and had followed Vicente ever since. Eventually Bianca wakes up and slowly starts to see and comprehend the dwarves and the strange house in which she’s been staying. Saying much more about the plot might reveal too much of the ending. Let me just say that what happens in the last part of the book is similar to the Disney movie.

Overall I’d say this book is okay. I was disappointed because I wanted a new perspective on a familiar story but I felt like all I got was the same story dropped into a different time with a few different names. I thought there were some clever ideas such as the poisoned apple was actually from the Garden of Eden and the mirror being created by the dwarves. The characters bored me...I never learned anything about any of the characters that made me care about them or even dislike them and when it all ended I just felt like I hadn’t learned anything. Maybe I just missed what Maguire was getting at. If viewed as pure entertainment, the book's not bad. I didn't regret reading it, but compared to Maguire’s other works I’d say it’s way below Wicked.