jacey | Booklog 83/2025: T Kingfisher: Hemlock and Silver (Reply)

Anja is nominally a healer, but she’s mainly an expert in poisons, or rather, antidotes. The king calls on her services when his daughter, Snow, is exhibiting signs of an illness that might be poison-related. The king seems quite benign for a wife-murderer. It transpires he caught his queen cutting out the heart of Snow’s sister, and ran her through on the spot, though too late to save the child. Snow is all the family he has left. Anja is swept off to a remote country estate with her lab equipment, a chime-adder and two bodyguards. The young princess is obviously not well, and is getting worse, but Anja eliminates all the obvious causes… until Snow’s strange silver-coloured apple appears to have an otherworldly origin. Helped by a talking cat and one of her bodyguards Anja discovers the strange silver world through the mirror, one in which some reflections take on a life of their own. There are echoes of Snow White with a touch of Rose-Red, but this is not a straight fairy tale retelling. The story, though fairy-tale-like, has a life and logic of its own. It’s dark fantasy told with a light touch. T. Kingfisher is one of my favourite authors.