A+ #AudioBookReview: Hemlock and Silver by T. Kingfisher

Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
Narrator: Jennifer Pickens
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, fairy tales, fantasy, retellings
Pages: 368
Length: 11 hours and 50 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on August 19, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Hemlock & Silver, a dark reimagining of “Snow White” steeped in poison, intrigue, and treason of the most magical kind.
Healer Anja regularly drinks poison.
Not to die, but to save— seeking cures for those everyone else has given up on.
But a summons from the King interrupts her quiet, herb-obsessed life. His daughter, Snow, is dying, and he hopes Anja’s unorthodox methods can save her.
Aided by a taciturn guard, a narcissistic cat, and a passion for the scientific method, Anja rushes to treat Snow, but nothing seems to work. That is, until she finds a secret world, hidden inside a magic mirror. This dark realm may hold the key to what is making Snow sick.
Or it might be the thing that kills them all.

My Review:

Snow. Glass. Apples. The images are iconic, aren’t they? Snow White. Mirror Glass. Poison Apples.

Howsomever, particularly considering that he was married to a woman who might as well be Maleficent, the King of this little fantasy kingdom is actually a rather decent – and somewhat nondescript – man. Also a desperate one. His 12-year-old daughter, Snow, seems to be dying by inches – and it’s not an easy or an easy death. None of the official court healers has a clue. That this seems to be an era when leeching and purging and OMG blistering the feet were the height of medical expertise, well, that’s not a surprise.

So he turns to a very unofficial healer, the spinster daughter of one of the kingdom’s prosperous merchants, a woman referred to as ‘Healer’ Anja. In Anja’s case, the title is a courtesy only, because she’s not really a healer and she’d be the first to admit that. But the church’s blessing on her work DOES keep the witch burnings away. At least so far.

Anja is more of a medical researcher than an actual healer. And the medicine that she has spent her life pretty much obsessed with is poison. Not exactly. (There’s a lot of not exactly and sorta/kinda and maybe and well, well uh, in the way Anja talks inside her head. The place from which this entire story is told – and told well if you like protagonists who are a bit too honest with themselves and frequently to their own detriment.)

The fact that some, many, possibly even most, poisons have no known cure is a problem that Anja has spent her life solving just a tiny corner of. She knows she’s not doing much, but solving the problem of poisons has consumed her life. Treating the patient attached to the problem isn’t her thing. At all. (She’s Gregory House only tactless rather than acidly cutting. She doesn’t want to emotionally wound the patients, but she just doesn’t know what to say to make the truth more palatable than it generally is.)

The king asks Anja to come to his daughter and figure out what’s the matter with the girl. Anja knows she’s being ordered to go, even if he never, ever uses those words, because he’s the king and he can do her father’s business untold damage, or simply have them all killed, if she refuses. This king isn’t like that – although he could be – and we get to experience all of Anja’s thoughts and fears on the subject as she agrees to go, caveat-ing all over the place that it might not be poison at all.

It is, and it isn’t. Just as there’s not exactly a poisoner – but there’s not exactly not one, either. Anja’s whole investigation runs headlong into a whole lot of people and things and situations that aren’t quite what they appear to be – but aren’t exactly not what they appear to be, either.

Because there’s an entire strange, fascinating and terrifying world that isn’t nearly so benign (and yes, that’s sarcasm) as what would in our world be Alice’s side of the looking glass. Filled with men, and monsters, and a queen who spent too long looking in the mirror and painted herself RED.

Escape Rating A+: This is surprisingly cozy for a fantasy about poisons. Then again, I’m not completely surprised because this is T. Kingfisher, and a LOT of her stories have quite a bit of cozy hidden inside. Like much of her work, it’s not cozy in any overt way, rather it’s cozy because she puts in a lot of cozy details about life in her created worlds, and it’s the kind of detail that feels cozy even when the events happening around those cozy details are very much NOT.

This story, like so much of her work, rides or dies on the back of – or rather in the head of – its first person protagonist, Anja. If you enjoy Anja’s voice – a voice that often feels like the voice of the author herself – you’re going to love this book. But if Anja’s constant second-guessing and self-deprecation and constant prevarication gets in the way of the story – for you – instead of BEING the story as it was for this reader, this may be more of a cup of chime adder venom than it is a delightful cup of tea.

(I listened to this one in audio, and the narrator, Jennifer Pickens, was just perfect for Anja. I loved the way that she was calm and reassuring, just the way that I thought Anja should sound, particularly when the person she was trying to reassure was herself.)

The thing about Anja, that I enjoy a lot about this author’s protagonists, is that the stuff she is gibbering inside her head is exactly the sort of thing that we all hope goes through our heads – and doesn’t spew out of our mouths too often – in the face of some of what she faces. And we all think we’re kinda weird and wonder why anyone puts up with us and all our faults are glaring and we’re never enough, etc., etc., etc. In other words, Anja has the same kind of impostor syndrome as the rest of us, so if you like seeing someone very real as a hero, she’s lovely. If you want your heroes to be heroic all the time, she’ll drive you bananas.

The story is also a lovely paean to the joys of scholarship and the delights of finding an answer to a question that has been plaguing you for ‘lo these many years’ that is terrific. Particularly if you’re female and have been told repeatedly and often that you’re too smart or like things that other people find inappropriate or distasteful for females but think is just fascinating when a male goes off on the exact same tangent.

I’ll get off the soapbox I borrowed from Anja and get back to things.

What made this story so much fun, for me, were the details of Anja’s life and her investigations and her desperation to solve the problem of Snow’s poisoning. Not that she doesn’t want to save the child, but what spurs her is her love of discovery.

The world that she finally discovers behind the mirror – with the help of an obnoxious, egotistical, self-centered and entirely much too cattitude-filled CAT is every bit as thrilling and frightening as any hero could have wished makes everything both simpler and more complicated – as such discoveries do. She has a big piece of the puzzle – and so MANY more questions that need to be answered.

I have to admit that I was surprised at the way the mirror world worked, because a fairy tale reimaging is absolutely NOT the place I expect to find the Star Trek “Mirror Universe”, but it’s here anyway. Not exactly, but close enough, right down to the description of the characters as “aggressive, mistrustful and opportunistic” – which describes the Mirror Queen to a “T”. Or perhaps that should be an “A”, as in apple, and we’re back where we started from.

In the end, this story is terrific, and it would be even better if it weren’t a reimagining of Snow White. But it is and that makes it all the more delicious, as this is a Snow White who in the end, gets her own damn revenge thankyouverymuch – with the help of a fairy god-cat, a gang of monstrous helpers who are pretty much the opposite of dwarves, and a female healer who solves the puzzle, saves the day and earns her very own happy ever after.

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