Mirror, Mirror by Gregory Maguire
Title: Mirror, Mirror by Gregory Maguire
Pages: 280
Rating: 1/5
Genre: Fantasy/Fairy Tale
Summary (Off Goodreads): The world was called Montefiore, as far as she knew, and from her aerie on every side all the world descended.The year is 1502, and seven-year-old Bianca de Nevada lives perched high above the rolling hills and valleys of Tuscany and Umbria at Montefiore, the farm of her beloved father, Don Vicente. There she spends her days cosseted by Primavera Vecchia, the earthy cook, and Fra Ludovico, a priest who tends to their souls between bites of ham and sips of wine.
But one day a noble entourage makes its way up the winding slopes to the farm -- and the world comes to Montefiore. In the presence of Cesare Borgia and his sister, the lovely and vain Lucrezia -- decadent children of a wicked pope -- no one can claim innocence for very long. When Borgia sends Don Vicente on a years-long quest to reclaim a relic of the original Tree of Knowledge, he leaves Bianca under the care -- so to speak -- of Lucrezia. She plots a dire fate for the young girl in the woods below the farm, but in the dark forest there can be found salvation as well ...
The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.
Review: There are some books that I have really loved that Maguire has written and there are others I couldn't stand. For instance, I adored Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister but the ending of Wicked ruined the entire book for me. I had gotten mixed reviews on Mirror, Mirror so I decided to try it out for myself. I really wish that I hadn't.
I feel like Maguire never actually got to the story. I just felt like I was being given a detailed list of all the things that had happened over the past few years that he decided not to write about. Instead of having events happen and then showing us the consequences of those events, we got pretty much one of those, "four years later" kind of deals where we then had to figure things out from the text.
The other thing that really annoyed me was that the stasis changed so drastically from the beginning to the end, I didn't know why people were still doing the things they were doing. For instance, Bianca's (our Snow White) father left in the beginning on an impossible quest because a powerful family had forced him to. But that family fell from power less than a year after they had sent him on his mission. I find it hard to believe that he would have continued, have left his daughter whom he loved, on the whim of a family that could no longer hurt him. Of course, it was possible that he had not heard of their fall from power, it was hard to tell. The time line was somewhat convoluted.
Also, magic seemed to exist in this world only when it was convenient. It seemed like Bianca and the dwarfs lived in a universe not of the rest of the world, as if there was some magical bubble that they lived in. Either have a world with magic or don't but worlds that combine the two bother me, like the author can't quite decide.
At first I understood Lucrezia's (our stepmother) jealousy of small Bianca. Lucrezia's brother set lustful sights on Bianca and so Lucrezia had her killed. And that partially made sense later but it basically came down to Lucrezia wanted to have sex with her brother, he didn't give in, she blamed it on Bianca and then Lucrezia's brother died. This rage lasted years and years, even after Bianca was presumed dead. It just wasn't a believable story for me.
Also, the dwarfs could have been so much more interesting but they just... weren't. They barely said anything and they were supposed to be this wise beings but they seemed so succumb to Bianca the second that she fell on their doorstep and suddenly became men of the world instead of the beings of the Earth that they were. It was entirely implausible that this woman, who had spent about four years sleeping, could change them so drastically when, in all honestly, she didn't do much.
The characters in the book were also very flat. I understand the fairy tale characters are supposed to be that way to a certain point, but I always felt the point of Maguire's books was to make these fairy tale characters INTO characters. He failed to do that here. They just annoyed me and never grew, never learned and never seemed to gain personalities.
Even Bianca's "prince" made no sense. It ended up being the same man that had been originally slated to kill her and inevitably let her go. But you didn't WANT him to be her prince. Her prince was the only story line that actually kept me interested and then I felt cheated.
Overall, it was a terrible book. Maguire never really told a story. It honestly felt like I was reading about Bianca sleeping for about ten years, because that's all that seemed to happen. And if it wasn't Bianca it was her father and if not her father than the dwarfs and if not the dwarfs than someone else. I honestly felt like I read 276 pages of people sleeping. There was no real story, no real plot and no real action.
Books so far this year: 17/75
Currently Reading: A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray & Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady of Rochford by Julia Fox
You can read this review and all others at im_writing or my Goodreads account.
X-posted to bookish and bookfails