What do You think about Mirror Mirror (2004)?
This book would have entertained me better if it had been on fire. I rarely ever put a book down before I have finished it, no matter how bad it is... but I not only put this book down, I gave it away. The cafe I was reading it at had a collection bin of books to send to the needy in Africa. After forcing myself to read it for several days, I walked right over and tossed it in. Sorry to whoever receives the book, perhaps it will be better than reading nothing, though I doubt it.Overall the book was a slow-read with undeveloped characters. I felt myself wishing it would all just end. I suggest any one looking to read this book study up on their Roman history and the Borgia family. You'll need it for this, and if you don't know it you might feel a little lost.In all fairness though I didn't like "Wicked". Everyone else on earth seemed to have loved it, so I truly felt like maybe I missed something. So onward I went in the Maguire books. Sometimes we all make bad decisions.
—Courtney
Stuff I Read - Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire ReviewI was surprised how much I liked this book. I probably shouldn't have been, because I liked Wiked, but in some ways I was disappointed with Wicked as well, with how it dealt with the Dorothy aspects of the story, and I am much more a fan of the Oz books than I am with anything Snow White related. Of course, that's possibly why I liked this one more, because I was less invested in the setting. Also, I'm a sucker for historical fantasies and this is a good one, visiting Provincial Italy during the squabbles of the Borgias and the Medicis and all the rest. It's a compelling read, tragic and full of flawed characters.The one character that really isn't flawed, of course, is Bianca. She makes an excellent Snow White, being basically a child, trapped by that innocence and ignorance. She is, in many ways, the mirror of Lucrezia, who becomes more the main character of the story. At the very least, the story is more about Lucrezia's life and her arc. She is the woman who falls in love with her brother. She is the woman who is sold off into marriage not once but three times. She is the one who cannot find happiness because she is never allowed the power to hold it. That she becomes a creature trying desperately to destroy Bianca is her own lashing out at the image in the mirror, at her own past and her own history, trying to kill it because of the harm it did to her.The story is also filled with some great fantasy. The dwarves are the clearest illustration of this, a sort of living earth that separate and gain individualism only through interactions with the human world. They are not quite the colorful and vibrant characters from the movie, but there is an element of that there. They are products of mainly Bianca's mind, and she gives them consistency until they are able to enter into the human world fully. But it is a fool's errand, as are so many of the things in the story. Vicente's quest for the apples, Cesare's for support, Lucrezia's for Bianca's death, and the dwarves quest for the mirror. Each are for things that they think they need, and each end poorly because they are looking in the wrong place.I liked the religious aspect of this all, too, the way that it's used, the hypocrisy of it, from the Pope using Lucretia to imply that he had incestuous dealings with her to the apples offering nothing of the positive knowledge they should have given to the monks imprisonment of Vicente for so long. It all worked, and worked well with the characters and story. This was not a happy story, was in many ways about the passing of magic into the mundane. But it was a good story, one that I thoroughly enjoyed reading, and in the end one that will probably stick with me for a time. That said, I'm giving it a 9.25/10.
—Charles
Okay, well. Shana and I were at the Used Book Sale at St. Agnes yesterday and she chided me for buying this when I said I'd probably dislike it. I said I would because I'm not sure anything Maguire does will compare with the freshness, the intrigue and the delight I found in Wicked. Or the quiet painterly tension in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, which I liked almost as much.The gimmick, of course, is getting old. In Mirror, he takes Snow White into the viper's nest of the Borgia family in 16th century Italy and, well, it sort of falls flat. None of the characters get enough page time to really develop at all, not the way Elphaba did. You don't get into their minds and see the classic flat fairy tale twisted on its edge. What's the point in retelling a fairy tale if the retelling is as one-dimensional as the original story?His graceful way with words is still there, of course, as is his ability to draw away from one scene and fall seamlessly but intentionally into another, stitching the two side by side in the right way. But perhaps the story of Snow White doesn't carry as much weight as the complex Wizard of Oz (which, of course, draws on a far meatier starting point in L. Frank Baum than the usual flat fairy tales) or the quiet injustice of Cinderella (made SO palpable you barely remember the original story's destination). But I was still disappointed. I still expected Maguire to pull through, no matter how many oddly-angled dwarf chapters I read or how artlessly he tried to make the cunning and terrifying Lucrezia Borgia into the flat vain Wicked Witch. Not to mention how utterly boring Bianca de Nevada was.Pity. I guess I'll still read Lost and finish out the Maguire oevre.
—Krissa
