hemlock & silver by t. kingfisher
hemlock & silver by t. kingfisher was my march read (because I guess I am on that one book a month pipeline). it is a loose retelling – or maybe it's just loosely inspired by(?) snow white, except it follows a different main character, an ordinary healer named anja (well, "ordinary" but for her special interest in poison).
in this book, snow – no last name, but presumably "white"? – is unwell, but no one can figure out what's going on with her. suspecting poison, the king comes to anja, known for her expertise. she relocates to his castle to uncover what it could be and finds herself embroiled in a much eerier mystery...
I feel like there are three main hallmarks of t. kingfisher's writing:
(1) mildly disturbing concepts, written and engaged with in a matter of fact way
(2) an erratic ADHD style of humor (best represented in swordheart, in my opinion)
(3) main characters who are in middle age and don't conform to conventional standards
hemlock & silver didn't have much of that typical t. kingfisher humor in it (well, there was a bit but mostly in quippy throwaway lines), but it absolutely checked off the first and third points.
re: the first point. the storyline and elements within it were lightly to deeply unsettling, and I read everything with a vague sense of horror, which only made the plot and the world that much more immersive. it takes what is familiar – queens and mirrors and poison apples – and expands it greatly, bringing you liminal worlds and alternate realities and strange theories. it's a very cool experience to have your imagination stretched like that. maybe that's why I love retellings so much. it's basically fan fiction.
"Look, a patient is a person with a problem, right? ... Except that for you, a patient is a problem with a person inconveniently attached. If you could just have the problem without the person, you'd be much happier." ... He wasn't wrong. A good healer wants to help the person. Whereas what l wanted was to solve the problem.
re: the third point. anja reads as neurodivergent and very grownup, which I enjoyed. she has a grounded, realistic view of the world and all the ways it disappoints –
Maybe the point of gods and saints is that they can make the monstrous choices that people can't. Or maybe Anthony's life was always going to end when it intersected with that little root that smelled of mouse nests, and the best the saints could do was to bend his cousin's mind to an obsession that would someday save others, and pry some good out of tragedy.
this is a fairytale story but anja has all these attitudes and beliefs we share in our real modern day world. things like "there should be a cure for this and it's crazy that there isn't" – anja is experiencing it in the context of the story but we experience it all the time too, and I like how t. kingfisher built that resonance into the book.
"Still, what else could I do? I had to try. Sometimes you get a miracle. Mostly you don't, but you still have to make space for the miracle to happen, just in case."
so anja is very grounded in reality... but she also retains her sense of whimsy – sorry, I hate using that word to describe ND women – it's really just that she retains a sense of curiosity and fascination and wonder toward the natural world. she's "a grownup" but she's not jaded, and in fact she's actively engaged and interested in what's going on around her. and I suppose that is a particular intersection of FMCs that I have a vested interest in reading.
Isobel would have liked this pocket garden, even if the rest would be too spartan for her tastes. Spikes of red adorned the desert hyssop, and hummingbirds buzzed each other furiously for access to the flowers. Tiny bees armored in iridescent green carapaces climbed across white viper-master flowers. Everything was simple and everything was alive.
I inhaled this book because the story was so interesting and I wanted to find out what happens next. but at the end of it all, I'm sort of questioning how much I really liked it. like, I read it the way that I used to scroll tumblr, which is that I would scroll scroll scroll in an attempt to reach the end. I needed to know how the story resolved; it's like I was satisfying a curiosity, or a simple need to finish something.
when I step back, though, I actually don't feel much toward the book itself. nothing really stuck with me. I liked seeing a character like anja but I don't think she or any other character was all that richly drawn. I actually don't think there was much internal character development at all. the storyline came out of external circumstances, a history that was already progressing forward, with or without anja – she just happened to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right amount of curiosity.
so here's where I'm landing: hemlock & silver was an engaging read, but it's not the kind of book I'd ever think to pick up again.
I feel this way about most of t. kingfisher's books. I was really sucked in by nettle & bone – truly loved that book and think about it all the time. very few of the author's books have lived up to it since!