Finished this book over the weekend and this has definitely been a work in progress. I bought this book way back in 2010 some time (probably before the summer) and it has taken me that long to read. If that's any indication, well, I didn't really enjoy it too much.

This is another one of the fairy tale rewrites from Gregory Maguire and while I love love love his other books like Wicked, Tales of an Ugly Stepsister and Son of a Witch, I just really could not get through this one. This is his version of Snow White mixing in the Grimm's fairy tale storyline that we all recognize with the real historical figures of the Borgia family in the 1500's.

The main character, Bianca de Nevada, grows up in a picturesque farm in Montefiore in the Tuscany/Umbria region with her beloved father Don Vicente. Her idyllic lifestyle is then turned on its head when a train of nobles randomly comes into town headed by Cesare Borgia and his sister Lucrezia. Cesare Borgia sends Don Vicente on a year long quest to recover a relic from the tree of knowledge (apples), Lucrezia takes over daily life in Montefiore. As time goes on (1 year) and Bianca grows up (not really), Lucrezia becomes jealous of her (like a crazy woman since Bianca is still a child) and hires her huntsman to take Bianca out into the forest and kill her (bring back her heart etc. etc.). The huntsman can't do it, and I guess is somehow infatuated or in love with Bianca (who is I think about 10 at the time...weird) and he leaves her in the forest where the dwarves (written as stone people with no features or garbled up features) find her and take her home. She apparantly then slips into a coma for 5 years or so and wakes up as an adult woman and a bunch of nastiness ensues on the first day that she wakes up. Maguire also describes the dwarves home but can't seem to make up his mind as to whether it's a cottage or a cave or a craggy rock or a rock formation or something rock like and dark but with pillars and walls? Apparantly it's also close to her home but she doesn't return home and lives in an almost self-imposed imprisonment where she's too afraid to step outside.

Anyway, Lucrezia is keeping tabs on her through a magic mirror that somehow connects the stone cottage of the dwarves with the farm. The mirror was originally in the possession of the stone people (who can merge their bodies into stone walls to manipulate objects) and they're trying to get it back. Then a bunch of weird and confusing things happen. Lucrezia tries to kill Bianca about 3 times I think and never gets it right and each time she tries to kill her, the method just gets weirder and weirder. She finally gets her to die and she stays like that for probably 5 or 10 more years...then the huntsman shows up confessing his love for Bianca and he's probably 30 years her senior and was living as a monk in some hillside somewhere to repent for not killing her. Then Lucrezia's son shows up and wants to kiss her because apparantly he knows that's how to wake her up. And then at the end, she's suddenly awake and walking but Maguire never explains how she wakes up or even what happened to wake her up...Yeah...

This was just a strange strange book. The characters were never really given time to develop and were thrown together almost as an afterthought. Maguire probably got the character portrayal of Bianca and Lucrezia correct in terms of the Disney version that we all know, Bianca was a completely witless and brainless girl and Lucrezia was just nuts. But either way, the story was confusing, hard to follow and the characters poofed in and out of the story with no follow through. Definitely not as good as Wicked was with its superb characters like Elphaba.