Just for a second, forget everything you know about the well-known
story of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves." Forget the animated
movie with the singable songs, forget the familiar story line with
its happy ending. Instead, imagine a darker tale, filled with
political intrigue, doomed quests and dark family secrets. Now you
can taste a little of the flavor of Gregory Maguire's new novel
MIRROR MIRROR. As he did with his previous novels WICKED (based on
THE WIZARD OF OZ and now a Broadway musical) and CONFESSIONS OF AN
UGLY STEPSISTER (based on "Cinderella"), Maguire takes the bones of
these old, well-known stories and completely reinvents them into
well-developed novels that can stand on their own. Maguire has been
writing children's fantasy novels for a long time, so it is no
surprise that he can skillfully play with elements of classic
fantasy and make them into something totally new and often
surprising.

But don't think that MIRROR MIRROR and its predecessors are novels
for children --- no, these are definitely fairy tales for
grown-ups. In MIRROR MIRROR, history and fantasy are intertwined,
and two of the main characters are the decadent (and incestuous)
Borgia siblings, Cesare and Lucrezia. Near the beginning of the
novel, the two pay a visit to the widower Vicente de Nevada and his
strikingly lovely daughter Bianca at their villa, Montefiore,
tucked in the hills of Tuscany and Umbria. Cesare sends Vicente off
on a seemingly hopeless quest for the last remaining branch from
the apple tree in the Garden of Eden. The beautiful but vain
Lucrezia, her eye always on opportunities for personal advancement,
offers to set up residence at Montefiore and keep an eye on
Bianca.

Vicente's quest takes years, and eventually he is assumed dead.
Soon enough, though, Lucrezia's jealousy of Bianca's looks --- and
specifically her resentment of Cesare's attraction to the girl's
youthful beauty --- drives her to plot the girl's demise. As you
might guess, however, the lovely Bianca survives, and the
increasingly desperate Lucrezia is driven to more and more extreme
lengths to destroy the girl who is "the fairest one of all."

Maguire's skill in MIRROR MIRROR, as in his previous works, is with
playfully reinventing familiar plots with darker themes and
characters. Here the dwarves, for example, are not silly slapstick
characters but shapeless, nameless stone-like creatures who
gradually gain elements of humanity through their interactions with
Bianca and their own quest to retrieve the mirror that causes so
many problems: "The dwarves had hobbled out of their stony natures
partly by accident and somewhat by design. . . . But now they
couldn't empty their pockets of memory, of irritation, of regret or
conundrum, of paradox or paradise. They were trapped by the laws of
their own devising." The transformation of the dwarves is just one
of the thought-provoking themes running through the novel.

Character development, however, is not particularly strong in this
book or in Maguire's previous fairy tale adaptations. In his
earlier novels, Maguire played with characterization by making the
reader care about traditionally unsympathetic characters such as
the wicked witch or the ugly stepsister. In MIRROR MIRROR, though,
the "evil stepmother" figure portrayed by Lucrezia Borgia remains
unlikable from start to finish, and her motivations are never
adequately explored. Even the character of Bianca is not
particularly engaging --- she remains a passive, somewhat lifeless
character throughout the novel. Part of the problem is the rate at
which Maguire changes narrators --- each brief chapter is told from
a different point of view, and just as we settle into one
character's voice and vision, we're whisked away to the next.

This narrative technique does make for a brisk and lively reading
experience, though, which provides a nice contrast to the sensuous,
luxurious descriptions of the Italian countryside. Readers looking
for an imaginative, playful reworking of classic tales can't do
better than Gregory Maguire's fractured fairy tales, and MIRROR
MIRROR continues his strong tradition.