Snow Whyte and the Queen of Mayhem

****

4 Stars/5

Thanks to Netgalley and Cedar Fort for giving me this book to review.

All Kat has ever known is working on her uncle’s orchard with Jeremy, but when her uncle’s behaviour changes and Jeremy has left to sort things out in his life, she runs away to live with seven dwarfs. However, what she does not realise is that she is the Princess of Mayhem and a man who is stuck in a mirror by her evil mother Queen Radiance, has been watching her all her life.

This is a wonderful retelling of Snow White which I did not want to put down. The characters are interesting and believable and Lemon is really good at descriptions as I could really imagine all the places in this book.

The one thing that makes Snow Whyte different from other retellings is that it is told from the point of view of the Mirror. The Mirror, who is actually a man called Jasper, can watch people in his prison but can’t help them, and fights and deceives the evil queen whenever he can to help Kat and all of Mayhem. If I have one problem with this book it is that with Jasper narrating it is harder to connect to the characters as we cannot see what they are thinking and have to rely on Jasper’s interpretation to be correct.

Snow Whyte is brilliantly written and has more than one twist which left me shocked, but also with hindsight I wondered how I missed them. This is a charming book which I would recommend to most people but especially to people who like YA fairy-tale stories such as Ella Enchanted or Beauty by Robin McKinley.