Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust (2017)

Mina’s past was out of her control, ruled by her tyrant magician father, feared by the locals. Now, she will choose. She will climb up the social and royalty latter to be queen and she will succeed. With marrying the king comes Lynet, his daughter, a stunning image of the previous queen. Sixteen years later, Lynet is a fierce, but childish, princess. She fears becoming queen one day and is in no rush to attain the position. So, when her father dies out of the blue she is rushed with confusion and fright. Mina is too, but for different reasons. She could lose her throne and everything she’s worked toward to Lynet. Soon, their grief turns into competition because only one can control the throne.

Thank you to Netgalley, who provided me an ARC of Girls Made of Snow and Glass in return for honest feedback. I have been excited about this book ever since it was announced and even more excited when it was marketed as a “feminist retelling of Snow White.” For me, Snow White is one of my least favorite fairy tales because of the misogyny and sexism in the story, so I was all ears and am glad someone decided to turn this tale into something we can proudly tell little kids.

What would happen if there wasn’t nearly as much girl-on-girl hate and the Queen and Snow White actually worked together and loved each other? Constantly in fairy tales, two women are pitted against each other, needing to destroy the other in order to succeed. This idea just doesn’t work for me. Don’t get me wrong, in Girls Made of Snow and Glass there is definitely some rivalry between Mina and Lynet. However, at the end of the day, they really did care about each other. When things went bad, they focused on how the other would be feeling and how they could fix the situation with the least damage.

Another thing I loved: there was no prince. Yes, Lynet did have a love interest, and her name was Nadia. It was a very subtle romance that was almost unnoticeable, except for some moments. This especially made me happy because I haven’t seen a lot of girl-with-girl relationships within the world on Young Adult fiction. Of course, there is a lot more representation in general of LGBT+ relationships in YA, but I’ve noticed that most of it consists of boy-with-boy relationships. In fact, the only real girl-with-girl relationships I’ve seen are from Nina LaCour’s books (I’m sure there’s more that I don’t know about).

Still, even a book with great themes can fall apart if the characters and writing isn’t great. I felt almost no connection to Lynet or Mina. This book separates into two stories: Mina’s rise to power when she was a teenager and the Lynet’s story when she’s sixteen. Because of that, you’d think the reader could really connect to Mina, being we’ve read through a majority of her life and seen her developed. However, even with that, I didn’t really know anything about Mina. She showed no personality, same as Lynet. If the chapters weren’t split, I wouldn’t know which character I was reading from because they sounded so similar. Lynet was also almost too sweet. Terrible things were happening to her but she showed almost no anger. I thought it was totally unrealistic and unrelatable

The writing was almost painful to get through. I found that the pacing was really off and I had to drag myself to get through the first half of the book. Then, through the second half, so many things happened at once. It almost felt like they were two separate books.

Overall, this was no longer a hit or miss for me, but was still rememorable because of the themes. I am definitely glad I got a chance to read Girls Made of Snow and Glass  and hope more fairytale retellings follow suit.

3 Stars