Anja became obsessed with poisons at a young age when her cousin accidentally ate hemlock and died. Over years, she’s tested different remedies for various poisons and even developed her own using snake venom. When the king’s daughter, Snow, starts showing signs of poisoning, Anja gets called on to help figure out what’s going on. Lovable, relatable, funny, strong MC. Intriguing mystery in a unique world. Sweet romance. Sarcastic talking cat. What more could you want? This is being billed as a Snow White retelling which is somewhat true. But the story is very different and so are the themes. It felt almost more like Alice in Wonderland with Snow White imagery. Still a unique story all on its own. If you love Kingfisher's other novels, you'll continue to be endeared to her. If you like a revised fairy tale, pick this up.

Kingfisher is absolutely magical. There all there is to it. Her pacing and character work and worldbuilding is always phenomenal and Hemlock and Silver was absolutely no different. I cannot recommend enough.

Another T. Kingfisher winner. Realistic heroine in her 30s, good humor, and a fairytale but not one you've heard before. If you liked Kingfisher's Swordheart, Fawcett's Emily Wilde tales, or Novik's Uprooted, I would definitely recommend this one.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✨ (4.5 stars)

Hemlock & Silver is a dark, enchanting reimagining of Snow White that feels completely fresh!
Kingfisher weaves unsettling magic with dry humor and delivers a heroine unlike any I’ve read!! Anja is smart and wonderfully sarcastic.

The atmosphere is rich and eerie without being overwhelming which perfect for readers who love a little spook without diving into full on horror. And while the romance is subtle, it’s the kind that lingers…
The quiet protector and slow-burn tension? Yes, please.
🪞🖤

Took half a star off for a few slower moments, but honestly? I’ll probably end up reading this book again.

Thank you to Tor books for this arc in exchange for my honest review!

This is my favorite fairy tale retelling I have read in a long time, and definitely my favorite take on Snow White. The book has all the key elements of Snow White, from the mirrors, to the poisoned apples, and an evil queen, but still managed to be fully unique and unexpected. Which, I feel, is often lacking in a fairy tale retelling.

This book was simply unsettling in the best way possible. Kingfisher once again was able to capture a level of comfort in an uncomfortable, and sometimes downright creepy, tale. This book is perfect for people who want a spooky story but doesn’t want to commit to a true horror novel.

By far, the best part of this book is the main character. Anja is funny, brilliant, and knows exactly who she is. Her commentary throughout the story, with the mini-4th wall breaks alleviated some of the tension while making the stakes feel real because she felt so real. Kingfisher excels in writing female characters who are unique and so entertaining.

Finally, I couldn’t review this book without talking about the romance. I simply ate it up! Steadfast, quiet bodyguard who will follow you and protect you while you follow your passion and make maybe questionable decisions regarding your safety for the sake of curiosity? I mean, what is not to love! This book is not meant to center the romance, which I enjoyed, but the bits of romance we got were 10/10 and made me truly fall in love with this book

4.75 ⭐️ rounded up

A Snow White reimagining by my favorite dark and cozy author? Say no more! I am always eager to read anything this woman puts out and this did not disappoint!

While this is very loosely based on Snow White, the main focus of the story is our delightfully neurotic FMC, Anja, a 35-year-old single woman who is very academically minded and skilled within the realm of antidotes and poisons. (Although I am offended that in the realm of fantasy 35 is considered old and I am older than that!) Anja is called upon by the king because his daughter, Snow, is ailing and no physician can seem to cure her. She is brought to the villa Snow is being kept at along with her two new body guards, Javier and Aaron, and her poisonous pet snake. While she tries to solve the mystery around the poison- she ends up discovering an alternate world behind the mirror.

The first solid 20% of the book is an introduction to Anja and getting ready to travel to Snow. I really enjoyed this part. Upon getting to the villa, we get to see a lot of the cozy banter Kingfisher is known for while Anja interacts with the guards, the king, the servants, and other gentry. Anja also ends up obtaining a pet rooster and befriends(?) a talking cat. There’s also a romantic subplot for Anja.

I only took off .25⭐️ because some of the mystery is a little obvious. But I’m here for just the vibes! Highly recommend this to anyone who loves a dark, cozy retelling or fantasy.

Welp, Hemlock & Silver is a very, very T. Kingfisher sort of book. If I’d read it blind, I think I’d have picked it for a Kingfisher novel, because it has her hallmarks: very inventive interpretation of a source story while adding her own characters, a lot of warmth, and of course a central middle-aged female character who is absolutely capable, if a bit out of her depth.

That’s not to say this is a retread of other books by Kingfisher: her interpretation of the Snow White story is its own thing (and though it includes Rose Red, it’s not the “Snow White and Rose Red” story I know; closer to the Snow White story people know best through Disney). Anja and her efforts at applying the scientific method in this fairytale/medieval-technology setting are recognisable as being Kingfisher’s work, but Anja’s her own person too. I loved the scenes where she gets absolutely fascinated by a new discovery — she and I probably have some things in common!

I liked the characters a lot, including some of the side characters like Lady Sorrel, and of course, Grayling. Some of the concepts were super cool, too, with a very original monster concept about which I won’t say too much.

I did want to hit Anja with a pillow about one conclusion she’d jumped to, though…

If you’re a fan of Kingfisher, you’ll love it; if you’ve never tried it, it strikes me as a pretty good place to start.

T. Kingfisher is the queen of dark fairytales, and even if every one of her fairytales shares a thread in common, the entire tapestry is rich and varied. This one felt incredibly satisfying to sink my reader's teeth into, and I completely got lost in the story. For readers of fairytales who continue to grow older and see ourselves in various characters in stories as we age, this book feels like it's written for us.

I love a fairy tale retelling with a middle-aged woman who has a low tolerance for nonsense. This is a very imaginative take on Snow White, and the physics of the mirror realm made my head spin. The characters are wonderful, with the most interesting one being of course the cat (or not-cat!)

I loved this! I am relatively new to T. Kingfisher but I have loved everything I've read by her. This one didn't disappoint!! I love Anja and very much enjoyed the "following Anja's internal thought process" narrative style. I think it might bother some people but as a fellow neurodivergent person (Anja is very neurodivergent coded) I loved it! The mirror-gelds freaked me out if I thought about them for even one second. I love the "this thing is perceived as a monster but it's actions aren't monstrous" vibe but I couldn't picture what they actually looked like without getting the willies. It very much reminded me of the thumb people in Spy Kids and the maw-mouth in the Scholomance books. Both of which also freaked me out. All this to say, I loved this book and very much recommend it!

Well, I feel entirely justified in my unease in front of mirrors facing beds now. I love how T. Kingfisher can consistently bring new life into fairytales, making me completely forget it's a retelling. There's something so charming about having Anja approach life so scientifically, and yet still get swept up in palace intrigue. She's just minding her own business when -- surprise -- the king shows up and needs her to save his mysteriously ailing (poisoned?) daughter.

If you love an animal companion, this book is for you. Anja travels with a venomous snake, which she milks to create antivenoms, a rooster reminiscent of HeiHei, and has the best interactions with a castle cat that I can imagine. Their banter is unmatched.

I also loved that T. Kingfisher let Anja be uncomfortable with kids. I feel like it gave her an interesting arc as she tried to figure out how to monitor or curtail the princess, and also deeply relatable. The romance was almost an afterthought, but I will never not deeply appreciate the love stories T. Kingfisher writes for older protagonists. This one was no exception, and Anja really deserved her ending.

I loved that I could forget that this story was scaffolded on the fairytale of Snow White so readily and truly immerse myself in this rich desert world of poisonings and intrigue. Thank you to Netgalley and Tor for the advance copy of this latest T. Kingfisher book. Can't wait to add it to my collection.











Spoiler about theme below this line - stop reading here if you haven't read yet.
____________________________




(spoiler) Thematically, that this trouble all tracked back to the neglect of these women's emotional health, such that they needed to invest so much weight in their relationships with their mirrored selves, thereby imbuing those mirrored selves with such power, also felt particularly poignant to me. Of course none of it excuses the mirror queen's behavior, but spending that much time alone in a mirror world would be enough to drive anyone to make bad choices in an effort to escape. (/spoiler)

This is a sort-of Snow White retelling, where instead of focusing on Snow White herself, we follow poison-expert Anja as she is summoned by the King to heal the mysterious ailment of his teenaged daughter, Snow, after the death of her mother the Queen. When she arrives at the estate where Snow is living, she conducts a thorough investigation into what might be poisoning the princess, and encounters some strange happenings related to the mirrors placed in her rooms.

Anja is a delight. I’ve mentioned before that I find there’s a lack of interesting older women characters in fantasy novels, but Kingfisher is an author I can always rely on for that (and while they share some similarities, they’re all distinctly different too, not carbon copies of basically the same woman in every book). She’s smart, but sort of awkward, and her tendency to blurt out random facts at inappropriate times is very funny. The setting as well was very interesting—instead of the basic vaguely-central-European-foresty region that seems to be the default setting for most fairytale-inspired stories, instead we get a desert region with flora and fauna reminiscent of the American Southwest (which provides a lot of information for the poisons that Anja works with).

I tend to sort Kingfisher’s books into three categories: horror, romantic-focused fantasy, and fairytale retellings. This is probably the first book of hers that I have trouble fitting neatly into one category as it’s a really good blend of all of the elements that I love about her other books.

I love and adore fairy tale retellings, and this one was so creative, funny, and suspenseful! The opening conversation between Anja and the king had me laughing out loud. I love a heroine who is relatable and quirky. I will admit it got really slow after that for a few chapters, but once she really got into solving the mystery of Snow’s poisoning, boy did it take off. I was hooked! I don’t want to spoiler anything, but it fits with the Snow White fairy tale so well!!! Anja and her bodyguard make a great sleuthing team, and the romance between them while not the focus of the story, did bring further enjoyment. There are other whimsical side characters that bring lightness at times of high suspense including a talking cat. Loved this book and highly recommend it!

5/5 stars
0/5 spicy peppers (This is not a romance, but many Kingfisher books have romantic subplots, so I figured I'd include this.)

TLDR at the end.

Have you ever read a book and been completely unable to put it down? (Of course you have; you're a reader!) That was this book for me. I found myself walking around reading the book trying to do things like load the dishwasher and spectacularly failing because of course. This was also a profoundly bad idea given that I am recovering from a broken leg, but who can blame a person so totally engrossed by a book. Eventually I just sat down and finished it because what was the point in trying to do anything else?

Everyone knows the original tale by the Brothers Grimm. This book is not that. Sure, we loosely see a few of the same or similar characters, and this book is just as creepy and disturbing, but that's about it. What we do have is 35-year-old Anja, a larger woman who is obsessed with poisons and antidotes, who is called upon by the king to investigate whether a very ill 12-year-old Snow White is being poisoned.

I absolutely adored the cast of characters. Anyone who's a fan of Kingfisher knows that she frequently writes non-stereotypical leads, and here we were delivered such a wonderful group of them:
1) Anja is no fighter, but she's smart, funny, tactless, and fully capable of her own adventure story. I loved that she is a larger, somewhat dowdy woman, and that aspect is just part of her rather than something that's harped on throughout the story. She doesn't have to me a young, beautiful, thin, overpowered woman to have her own adventure or love story. I also appreciated that she wasn't maternal, and she faced the aggravating treatment many women without children are posed with.
2) Snow is not exactly a likeable girl, which is something I actually really loved about her. She doesn't have to be a perfect, beautiful princess, of which she is neither, to be worth saving.
3) Javier, the object of Anja's affection, is a late-30s guard who is assigned to Anja's protection detail along with Aaron. (As an aside, I fully expected a threesome between Anja, Javier, and Aaron, which is absolutely NOT Kingfisher's style. I think I've been reading too much smut for my own good.)
4) Grayling, also known as "His Gloriousness, God-King of Deserts, Lord of Rooftops ... He Who Treads the Serpent's Tail," etc., is my favorite character. A one-eyed gray cat, he is in and out of sight at his own convenience. He reminds me of my own very grumpy gray cat, and he's kind of the antithesis of Bone Dog in Nettle & Bone. (The afore mentioned book as phenomenal if you haven't read it already.)

As far a pacing goes, at first I felt the book was a little slow, especially prior to Anya arriving at the palace. As I continued reading, I realized how perfectly paced it really is: slow and light-hearted, to somewhat unsettling, and finally to real horror. It was a perfect buildup of tension. Regarding style, I love the parenthetical side notes, as they remind me a bit of Terry Pratchett's footnotes.

TLDR: To wrap it up, I adored Hemlock & Silver. It delivered everything that I love about T. Kingfisher's books:
- It was funny and delightfully creepy.
- The main characters were not your typical super young and beautiful badasses, though I'd argue Anya is a badass in her own right.
- The side characters with any real screen time made their own mark on the story. Eloise and her hair come to mind, as well as Lady Sorrel.
- The romance, while not spicy at all, was perfectly pining and sweet. I love a good romantic subplot.

T. Kingfisher's wit always draws me into her books from the very first line. I love when a book literally has me hooked from an opening page and she does it every single time. Anja is another of her great female protagonists. Her sardonic sense of humor is just a joy to read. Her narration was everything I wanted. It was a joy to follow her, Grayling (a narcissistic talking-cat), and Javier (her guard) as she tries to figure out what is going on with the king's daughter, Snow.

I enjoyed reading about the mirror world and learning about it along with Anja. The mystery of what was going on with Snow was intriguing and I love where T. Kingfisher took this tale. Such an interesting twist! She always has such interesting twists on classic tales and I look forward to reading even more of her books.

There was a great amount of mystery, some darker elements, and a cute romance. It was utterly perfect and I cannot recommend it enough.

I've never read a T. Kingfisher book that I didn't love.

Healer Anja is my favorite kind of weirdo. She's in her 30s and works professionally as a curer of poisons and toxins, spending her days helping people who've overdosed and dosing chickens with chime adder venom. One day, the king arrives in her workshop and tells her that his daughter, Snow, is gravely ill and surely it is poison, for everything else has been ruled out. Promising only that she will try, Anja rides off with the king and his envoy to the villa of Witherleaf, where the norm is not as it seems and the specter of an assassin looms.

Kingfisher never fails to make me laugh, snort, or at the very least do that little nose huff when something is funny. You know the one. Further, she never fails to catch me off guard, either, just when I think I know what's going on. As with her Paladin series, the body horror and the actual culprits are MUCH worse than I thought they were gonna be, and the comic/stress relief is so welcomingly jarring that it takes the edge off without ruining the atmosphere.

And the light romance! Ugh, I'm such a sucker for romance and Kingfisher is one of my favorite people for this. The characters are adults with their own adult problems and hang ups and desires, and just like in her Paladin series, these characters are so grounded and real. Their aches and pains are the reality of age, they are larger than a high schooler and so very aware of their bodies and limitations, but they don't hate themselves for it, and I love it so much. And the awkward flirting juxtaposed with the body horror? More, please! Always more!

I love Kingfishers books, her characters, the weird worlds she makes, all of it. Her books feel like an ADVENTURE, and this one is no exception.

Super huge thanks to Tor and NetGalley for this free eARC for an honest review!

I'm a fan of T. Kingfisher's Sworn Soldier series (this is my second title outside that series that I have tried) but sadly I didn't love this. The book did not keep my interest and I found that no matter when I picked it up the pacing had left me wanting to read other books unfortunately.

I DNF'ed the title.

You know it’s a Kingfisher book when it’s funny, and there’s a very smart middle-aged heroine, and also deeply scary villains, and ALSO it teaches you about weird science you never considered before, and also usually there is a male lead who is buff, I guess.
All of that holds true here!
Plus an extremely clever riff on Snow White, with a hint of Jackelope Wife mysticism if you’re into that! I am. I surely am.

If T Kingfisher decided to start writing a series on what the paint on a wall looks like as it dried, I would submit an arc request. There's something in there that I cannot put down. I would like to read everything she's written, and then peek into her mind. Please start giving guided tours, thanks.

I enjoyed this, is what I'm saying. I like my fairy tales warped and changed and "influenced by, not copied", so this was great. I found myself wanting to get little side stories of everyone involved, the characters felt fully fleshed out and real. Much like the people in the mirror, I found myself thinking if I just turned a page quickly, I might catch a glimpse of them going about their business, completely independent of the story itself.

One last note, I will always be in awe of the mythology and religion in her books. They feel so ancient and known.

Healer Anja will be the first to tell you she's not much of a healer, unless what's she's healing is the effects of poison. Poisons have fascinated her since childhood, and she's studied them intensely. So it's not terribly surprising when the king comes to her workshop, begging her to see to his daughter, who is afflicted by something that no other healer has been able to figure out. She reluctantly agrees, and watches, studies, tests, finds nothing. But then she sees the princess take a bite of a silvery apple, and then discovers the source of it, and it's no longer just about the poison.

Some reviewers say that this took a really long time to get going, and it's true that we don't get to the mirror world until halfway through, but I was invested from the beginning. Anja is a great character--she knows who she is and makes no apologies for it. She's not good with people, she's blunt, she's smart, and it's all presented with Kingfisher's usual wittiness. Then we fall through the mirror, and it took me a little bit to get back in the groove of the story--just a big shift in the feel. But given some time, I found my way back in, and enjoyed it straight through the end. I don't feel like the world-building within the mirror was as strong (there are parts of it that still feel a little hand-wavey "magic!"), but the story was still engaging and, in the end, I really enjoyed this one.