Hemlock & Silver

Hemlock & Silver operates at the intersection of high fantasy, detective mystery, and fairy tale revisionism. The quasi-medieval setting evokes a traditional fantasy world, but the discovery of magic in the form of the mirror-world comes as a shock to the protagonist, Anja, who is not a warrior or mage but a scholar of poisons. Indeed, much of the plot unfolds as an investigation: The king tasks her with “see[ing] what the others have missed” (9), positioning her as a private investigator hired to crack a difficult case. This structure places the novel in a subgenre that uses a scholarly or intellectual protagonist as its detective, a tradition exemplified by Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, in which a Franciscan friar investigates a series of murders in a secluded medieval monastery.

This mystery framework is overlaid with a deliberate subversion of the “Snow White” fairy tale. The victim is Princess Snow, whose mysterious lethargy, the result of eating “poison” apples, is reminiscent of her fairy-tale counterpart’s deep sleep. However, Kingfisher reimagines the tale’s core elements. In particular, the “wicked queen” inspires two distinct characters, both revealed to be tragic in different ways: Snow’s mother, whose loneliness and marginalization give rise to the Mirror Queen, and the Mirror Queen herself, who is desperate to escape her dreary existence in the mirror-world. Moreover, the figure who saves Snow is not the huntsman or the prince of the classic story but rather another woman—Anja herself.

This interest in women’s experiences and roles places Hemlock & Silver within a tradition of feminist fairy-tale retellings. The influence of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories looms large in this subgenre. Writing in the 1970s, the heyday of second-wave feminism, Carter subverted the misogynistic elements of classic fairy tales like “Bluebeard,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” instead using these stories to explore women’s agency and sexuality. This set a precedent for more recent retellings; for instance, Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver (2018) draws on “Rumpelstiltskin” while exploring the pressures women have historically faced to marry and bear children, while Alix E. Harrow’s A Spindle Splintered (2021) features a queer romance between supporting characters and a Sleeping Beauty figure who must save herself.