Title: Poisoned
Author: Jennifer Donnelly
Narrator: Rosie Jones
Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
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Oh this was so good. So so amazing. After reading Stepsister, a Cinderella retelling by the same author, I went into this with a lot of expectations. This book made me love Snow White. It was off to a slow start for me and I thought it was going to be another Snow White retelling I’d end up not liking. However, Jennifer Donnelly did a madness here. She broke down the old tale into bits and took each one and remade it, and rewrote it into something beautiful. The way she rewrote the dwarves, the Magic Mirror, and the Queen’s attempts on Sophie’s life, and so many other parts of the story. In her style with Stepsister, she added her own original twists and elements to the story to make it shine.
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Snow White isn’t my favorite fairytale princess by any means, because I feel like she was so dumb. I read a Snow White retelling some months ago that I just didn’t like. Snow White reiterations all over books and even TV mostly annoy me, and even in one of my favorite fairy tale retellings on TV, Once Upon a Time, the character of Snow White wasn’t my fave. This book made me like Snow White a little more, even though some of what I didn’t like about many other Snow Whites over literature and TV were still here, and even a character in the book pointed it out – stop being stupid. I always felt her so dumb, and I’m glad she grew out of that in this book.
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I also really appreciate that romance wasn’t at the forefront of this book. It played into many parts of the book, but it wasn’t majorly a romance book. It was more of a girl’s journey towards finding and following her heart.
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If you’re like me and you love fantasies and fairytale retellings, this is a book you’d love
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Blurb
Beautiful Sophie, with lips as red as blood, skin as pale as snow, and hair as dark as night, is about to come of age and inherit her father’s throne. But Sophie’s stepmother wants rid of her – beautiful she may be, but too weak and foolish to reign. And Sophie believes her, as she believes all the things that have been said about her – all the poisonous words people use to keep girls like her from becoming too powerful, too strong.
When the huntsman carries out his orders of killing Sophie, she finds a fire burning inside her that will not be extinguished, and sets off to reclaim what was taken from her.
Jennifer Donnelly turns her feminist eye to this most delicious of fairy tales and shows Snow White as she’s never been seen before.
The Author
Jennifer Donnelly is the author of thirteen novels and a picture book for children. She grew up in New York State and studied English Literature and European History at the University of Rochester.
Jennifer’s first novel, THE TEA ROSE, is an epic historical novel set in London and New York in the late 19th century. Her second novel, A GATHERING LIGHT, set against the backdrop of an infamous murder in the Adirondacks of 1906, won the Carnegie Medal, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Borders Original Voices Award, and was named a Printz Honor book.
In 2014, Jennifer teamed up with Disney to launch the bestselling WATERFIRE saga, an epic series about six mermaids on a quest to rid the world of an ancient evil.
Jennifer lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband, daughter and two rescue dogs. Follow Jennifer at http://www.jenniferdonnelly.com or on Twitter: @JenWritesBooks
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