title: Mirror Mirror: A Novel
author:  Gregory Maguire 
description: Maguire has a lock on clever, elaborate retellings of fairy tales, turning them inside out and couching them in tongue-in-cheek baroque prose. After his revisionist takes on Oz's Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked) and Cinderella's ugly stepsisters (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister), he now tackles Snow White. The notorious Borgia habit of poisoning rivals inspired him to transplant the classic tale to 16th-century Tuscany, where Vicente de Nevada is an expatriate Spanish widower who lives with his daughter, the fair Bianca. Beholden to sinister Cesare Borgia and Cesare's sister (and perhaps lover) Lucrezia, Vicente is sent on what appears to be a fool's errand, to discover and steal from a Middle East monastery a branch of the Tree of Knowledge complete with three apples. When Bianca is 11, Cesare's attraction to her causes the envious Lucrezia to order a young hunter to murder her and deliver her heart in a casket. Bianca, of course, is spared and taken in by seven dwarfs. But this is not Disney; the dwarfs are boulders, stirred to life by Bianca's arrival ("a clothed, bearded obstinacy became slowly apparent"). Several years pass in surreal, dreamlike fashion, with Bianca tending to the dwarfs, who cavort stiffly and philosophize collectively. When Vicente returns successful, Lucrezia poisons an apple for her rival. Innocent Bianca's fate is gentle, but that of the corrupt Lucrezia, in brilliant Venice, is appropriately grotesque. Fairy tales in their original form are often brutal and disturbing; with his rich, idiosyncratic storytelling, Maguire restores the edge to an oft-told tale and imbues it with a strange, unsettling beauty. <BR>Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  > Mirror Man
  
  > Jacques Von Kat
  
  Broadthumb Publishing
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright © 2021 Jacques Von Kat
  
  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be  
  reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any  
  means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,  
  scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the  
  publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website,  
  or distribute it by any other means without permission.  
    
  Jacques Von Kat asserts the moral right to be identified as  
  the author of this work.  
    
  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,  
  characters, places and incidents portrayed in it are the work  
  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any  
  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual  
  events is purely coincidental.  
    
    
  ISBN-13: 978-1-8383121-1-4  
    
  Cover design by: EC Editorial Cover Designs  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  > For our parents.  
  >  
  >  
  > &  
  >  
  > In loving memory of