Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher – Review

Healer Anja regularly drinks poison.

Not to die, but to save—seeking cures for those everyone else has given up on.

But a summons from the King interrupts her quiet, herb-obsessed life. His daughter, Snow, is dying, and he hopes Anja’s unorthodox methods can save her.

Aided by a taciturn guard, a narcissistic cat, and a passion for the scientific method, Anja rushes to treat Snow, but nothing seems to work. That is, until she finds a secret world, hidden inside a magic mirror. This dark realm may hold the key to what is making Snow sick.

Or it might be the thing that kills them all.

I will be honest and admit my bias right out of the gate: I adore Ursula Vernon, better known by her pen name T. Kingfisher. I picked up What Moves the Dead in a big-name bookstore back in 2023, enraptured with the cover art and synopsis written on the inner sleeve. Ever since that moment, I have been dedicated to pacing myself and thoroughly enjoying her entire body of work—which is ever expanding, with her often releasing multiple new titles per year across both horror and fantasy genres. Hemlock & Silver is the fifth book written by Kingfisher that I have picked up, and I never would have expected it to be the best one yet.

When I first read the synopsis before its release last year, I found myself put off by the description calling it a “dark retelling of Snow White”. I had read Nettle & Bone previously, another book of hers firmly in the “fairy tale” style of the fantasy genre, and while I enjoyed the book, I found it to be terribly low stakes for my usual taste. I went into Hemlock & Silver expecting a similar outcome; endearing and cozy, with a very plain main character and a simple plot devoid of stress or mystery that would require me to think. I was so excited to be proven wrong in the best sense.

Hemlock & Silver follows Healer Anja, who would be called a toxicologist here in the real world. Ever since a morbid encounter with wild hemlock as a child, Anja has obsessively researched, cultivated, and developed cures and remedies for a number of poison-related ailments. Her work has garnered the attention of the King, whose daughter is slowly ailing and dying due to an illness no one can seem to solve. Anja is conscripted to come to the King’s castle and observe Princess Snow in order to determine what (or who) is killing her, and how to cure her. As the story develops, Anja discovers Snow’s ailment is the result of contact with a realm contained within enchanted mirrors scattered throughout the castle. The question, however, remains: who is hurting Snow and how do they save her from wasting away?

The characters in this story are absolutely delightful. Healer Anja feels like the right combination of intelligent, well-studied, and also lacking common sense I would expect for a poison-focused healer in a pseudo-Late Middle Ages setting. In the first couple chapters, I was worried Anja would be too similar to Marra from Nettle & Bone, a main character that feels too simple and childish to be relatable to an adult reader. Anja, comparatively, is believably her age at 35 years old and her intelligence, personality, and socialization make sense with her family’s wealthy merchant background. She is sarcastic and sharp-witted in a way that feels similar to how Kingfisher herself speaks in interviews and on social media, and I found myself laughing frequently at her quips.

All the characters in this story are believable. The castle staff are meek and well-mannered, with Nurse being the firm and diligent staff member in charge of taking care of Snow directly. The named guard characters are practical and not intelligent or special past their own backgrounds and station—something I feel like a lot of authors mess up by making their commonfolk unusually well-learned for the setting. We are also introduced to a cat character who is the perfect combination of other-worldly changeling and gruff street cat.

I went into this book knowing it was a Snow White retelling, but somehow got lost in the poison terminology of it all just in time to be shocked by the mirror-realm reveal. Anja shares my thoughts perfectly when she first realizes there is a large mirror in her assigned bedchamber—these things are creepy, unnerving, and nightmare fuel. While this is one of Kingfisher’s fairy tale fantasy novels, I have a low tolerance for creepy and found this to be as chilling and nerve-wracking as her horror novels. The mechanics of how reflections work between the mirror-realm and the real world were fascinating and portrayed in an easy-to-understand way. I have seen criticisms that Anja’s character doesn’t solve Snow’s problem until it all but smacks her in the face—but I believe I disagree with those criticisms. Anja tells us she does not believe in magic, and it is clear the existence of a mirror-realm with talking cats and stitched together reflection creatures is far beyond what she could have ever fathomed.

There are some issues I found with the ending, and I feel like they could have been easily managed with less than another hundred pages. One of my biggest qualms is with the King’s character—once he embarks on a journey in the middle of the book, you never see him again. The resolution never addresses his reaction, or what attempting to explain the source of Snow’s ailment was like. The King is shown to be intelligent and probing throughout the first half of the book, so to suddenly lose his character’s curiosity and investment in his only surviving child’s ailment felt like an untied loose end to me.

The other problem was the order of events and character deaths was extremely convoluted and hard to follow. While they explained numerous times who killed who and in which sequence to deceive which other character, I still cannot tell you who died first or why. I pulled out my physical copy and reread it, I relistened to the audiobook chapter multiple times, and ultimately I gave up. The long and short of the situation became the antagonist used the confusion of the other characters in order to achieve their goals—and thoroughly confounded me as well.

Ultimately, I think Hemlock & Silver is the best jumping off point for a reader who has not read a Kingfisher book yet. It combines elements from the fairy tale fantasy she often writes in, as well as a few unnerving moments from her horror writing in books such as What Moves the Dead. It is most similar in flavor and style to Nettle & Bone, which is well-loved as a classic feeling fairy tale, without falling for some of its commonly noted criticisms.

I was thoroughly impressed with how it incorporated symbols and items from Snow White in order to be deemed a retelling without using a single actual plot point from the inspiring fairy tale—something I was worried about going into the book, as I truly hate the Snow White story. In all, Hemlock & Silver is a fantastic new installment in Kingfisher’s fairy tale works with a delightful (albeit unnerving) twist readers have come to expect from her horror novels.

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