Snow by Tracy Lynn

I am super, super picky about familiar fairy tales and their retellings. I'd rather have a dry and outdated "original" than a modern one that does nothing more than update setting--or, worse, imagines the story in a generic time past and loses all but the bones of the plot. I'm not going to name names, and truly, at the moment, I can't even think of any, but it's easy to retell a tale and lose the trimmings: the class differences, the all-too-real dangers of abuse and crime, the chill of winter with stores running low. Lose the trimmings, and maybe all you've got left is a turkey. (Or, maybe, really go wild with the trimmings, and you might get something innovative, like White Cat et al.)

That's not to say that a more traditional retelling can't be interesting, or at least comforting and familiar. Snow by Tracy Lynn (Simon Pulse), for me, is more of the latter.

Note, I suppose, that I'm not particularly fond of this Simon Pulse line of retellings; note also that I'm being particularly harsh on them. I say this because they generally date from the early 2000s, when the young adult shelves in bookstores, if they were even separated from middle grade and younger books, were much smaller places than they are now. Mostly, you could read Harry Potter, Eragon, books by Tamora Pierce, a handful of great contemporaries, and the first wave of "if you liked Harry Potter," which was mostly books about witches, loosely modeled on what people think Wiccans do, and which turned out to miss the mark on getting a piece of the Potter craze. So, if I'd found these retellings at that time, I'd have been thrilled to bits, having already read the other offerings.

Snow doesn't go as far afield from the story you might know in the first three-quarters of the book. Jessica, a duchess, loses her mother in childbirth and finds herself distanced from her father, who remarries. The new duchess arrives to their home in Wales, and takes Jessica under her wing, at first in a motherly, if arm's length, way. Duchess Anne becomes the patron of a Scottish violinist, Alan, but he is mostly used as her errand-boy for what might be magic or what might be mere scientific experiments. I really liked the awkward relationship between Jessica and her new mother Anne, and wished for more time on that and Victorian-duchess-as-scientist.

My reading of the next part was that Anne, already older than the average bride, has a series of miscarriages, and eventually, in her ever-declining mental state, decides to kill Jessica and use Jessica's heart in an iteration of the ritual to have a child. Jessica is in a sort-of confinement during this period, not quite locked up. Alan tips Jessica off to the plot, and she runs away. A lot of this happens off the page or in summary.

Of course, in the Victorian era, where could one run away but to London? Instead of ending up with dwarves, Jessica, now Snow, is maid to a rag-tag bunch of Lonely Ones, people who are part animal and who live by thievery. After establishing herself in this household, Jessica meets her stepmother again, who showers her with new things and her full attention, as--she's been told--her stepmother has been cured of her mental instability. And she's really, really sorry she tried to have Jessica killed, and that was partly about her anger at the male establishment and the place of women (not as scientists, but heir factories).

The final quarter of the book is packed with interesting details and plot that I wished for more of--a Frankenstein-ish and clockwork twist on Snow's dreaming suspension, a family-oriented plot that I caught, but that wasn't outrageously telegraphed--and again, I should note that word count then was not as flexible as word count now, and I'm sure there was a desire to have the books in the retellings series look to be somewhat the same size and shape. The nicest bit here is that the ending is happy, but unexpected, giving the denouement a non-traditional oomph.