Some book covers grab your
attention convincingly whilst others allow your eyes to glide by.
Mirror Mirror has a cover which is not highly remarkable and yet,
for some reason, it persuaded me to remove said book from the shelf and peruse
it further. Perhaps it’s the repetition
that focuses the attention and the title being subconsciously absorbed from DVD
releases of the Julia Roberts’ film of same name. Or, and I like this idea the best, perhaps it
was fairy-tale witchery at its finest.
I had never heard of Gregory
Maguire who also wrote Wicked, the
book on which the blockbuster musical was based. In fact, discovering this fact put me off a
little but in the spirit of fair-mindedness and objectivity, I delved into the
narrative.
The Premise of Mirror Mirror
Maguire has taken one of the
best-loved fairy-tales, Snow White,
and spun it into a completely new tale, the elements of the original poking up
to provide the supporting structure around, through and over which Maguire has
crafted his narrative.
And it is an enjoyable read. Snow
White had all the ingredients of a great story: love, deceit, magic, good
vs. evil – the whole gamut. Maguire has
expanded this into the realms of the Renaissance, making Lucrezia Borgia the
mistress of misery in the life of our heroine.
The premise of the tale surrounds
Bianca de Nevada who lives with her father in Italy with Primavera, the maid
and Fra Ludovico, the priest assisting with her upbringing. This is all thrown into disarray with the
arrival of Lucrezia and her brother, Cesare Borgia to their homestead, the end
result being Lucrezia stays to take care of Bianca whilst Vicente, Bianca’s
father is required to go on a mission to find the Tree of Knowledge. Vicente doesn’t dare refuse the Borgias and
leaves his daughter in Lucrezia’s capable (though of what?!) hands.
The Borgias
If you know nothing about the
Borgias, this book is bound to whet your appetite into finding out more about
them. Notorious, brutal, sexy, powerful
– they had it all. I think it was a
masterstroke of Maguire’s to centre the badness around Lucrezia. I wonder if he sat contemplating two
contrasting ideas: “I would love to rework a fairytale” and “The Borgias would
be a great subject for a novel”, deciding on a whim to throw them together and
see, daringly, what the result would be.
A good story is the truth,
imaginative flair shown throughout especially in the creation of the
dwarves. Their chosen names made me
laugh out loud and the way they are described by Maguire make them truly his
unique creations; weird but wonderful.
Of course, we all know the
outcome of this story so no surprises there although what actually happens to
Lucrezia is up for speculation with Maguire’s ending. It is a well-crafted, original story which I
thought began rather hesitantly and I was concerned that it would be
exasperatingly slow, verging on tedious.
I was wrong. The pace gathered
once the Borgias arrived and the threat to Bianca’s safety loomed.
Well worth a read.
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