Book Review: Mirrors & Ashes by Cat Bowser

Genre(s): Fantasy / Fairy-tale Retelling / YA

Mirrors & Ashes is a retelling of the classic Snow White story, with a few original twists. The dwarves are distinctly different than any description I’ve come across previously, and in this version, the reader is treated to the existence of Fae and elves, as well.

This is not the Disneyfied version of the Snow White story. This is a more grown-up tale, though geared toward a YA audience. It’s more than an evil queen seeking the death of the main character simply to appease her vanity. It involves kingdom politics, murder, tension between various species, the threat of war… In the heart of it all is Ember, a princess who befriended the dwarves despite her mother’s demands otherwise, and one of only a handful of people within the palace who does not succumb to the Fae’s magic.

I’ll be honest here: The Snow White tale isn’t one I actively seek out. However, Mirrors & Ashes was a refreshing spin on a story that I typically don’t enjoy. I liked this version of Snow White.

If you’re wondering why I read this book after my previous statement, it was this month’s book club pick. I’m glad it was chosen, because it’s one of the best renditions of this storyline I’ve read to date. I have read a couple other “retellings”, most notably Mirror, Mirror by Gregory Maguire, and I wasn’t too keen on that one. But back to the book at hand…

There was far more originality and world-building in this book than I’d expected when I picked it up. There was more action and tension than in the classic fairy tale, and Ember was a much more relatable character. This last point is the most important from my perspective; my struggle with the classic fairy tale stems from a disconnect between myself and Snow White. I typically can’t relate to her as a character, but as I said, Ember was different. This was a good story.

However, the copy I purchased had a significant number of errors. The author is a friend of some of the people in the book club, so I reached out to one of them to ask if maybe the wrong file had been uploaded prior to the book’s launch.

It’s every author’s worst nightmare, and it happens often enough I suspected it might have been the case. I knew the author had paid for an editor, and that initial copy didn’t have the feel of an edited manuscript.

Here’s what I learned: The unfinished version of the book was distributed by mistake and the author was working to correct the issue.

It’s a shame, because this book was the author’s debut. I can’t imagine a more stressful thing happening during any book launch, let alone my first. But such things can be corrected, and she did so.

I finished reading this book a couple of weeks ago, but held off posting a review until the corrected version was available. I didn’t want to post my misgivings with some of the text until I could see for myself what the book should have looked like. Now that’s it’s live, I’ve compared some of the problems I encountered in that initial version with the final version. While much of the punctuation and minor errors were fixed, I still found some of the sentences to be difficult to read. I am typically a fast reader, so it’s rare that I have to reread passages to make sense of them. If it had been only one or two, I wouldn’t have felt it worth mentioning, but this occurred throughout the book.

Readability issues aside, I liked the overall story, the world-building, and the cast of characters. The book isn’t perfect, but it’s still a good story and a unique take on the classic Snow White fairy tale.

Author website: catbowser.wixsite.com/catbowserauthor

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