A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
Last night I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
Mirror Mirror
Gregory Maguire
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers. Increasingly feral Kindle notes are saved here.
Oh, for FUCK’S sake. The next time I get a sudden and unexplainable urge to reread some book I found unimpressive fifteen years ago, I swear I’m going to slap myself. I feel almost as unclean as I did after I read Daughters of the Wild, and I don’t like it. Never do I ever want to read another childbirth-coded menstruation scene written by someone who has neither menstruated nor given birth, no matter how lyrically that person writes. That scene gave me the heebie-jeebies and it gave me sympathetic crampy twinges, and I cannot begin to articulate how profoundly irritating that is. But if there is one thing we know for certain, it’s that I have never, never in my life, really truly never ever never fucking learned from my own mistakes, so I reread the book against my own better judgment and now I have some thoughts. Regret is an emotion I have rarely experienced with the books I’ve carried to term since I realized DNF’ing is an option, but, well, gotta be a first – or a second, or a fifth – time for everything.
Before it became the latest in a series of regrettable literary escapades, I knew Mirror Mirror merely as that Snow White period piece I read back when I was maybe in my early twenties. Born in 1495 to Spanish emigrants Vicente de Nevada and María Inés de Castedo y Nevada, the stubbornly innocent Bianca de Nevada grows up in the sheltered comfort of Montefiore, her father’s Tuscan estate, hastily and unlawfully granted to him by Lucrezia Borgia after he caught her trying to murder the child fathered on her by her brother Cesare (with her consent, I feel compelled to add). Nothing is free with the Borgias, particularly not a piece of unspoken blackmail, so Lucrezia’s scorned son – named Michelotto – was quietly folded into Vicente’s household, where he is now known as the simple-minded, easily startled gooseboy. As he’s only a couple years younger than Bianca, they grow up in each other’s back pockets, primarily raised by Primavera Vecchia, a hilariously filthy-minded cook who claims to be older than Jesus and frequently feuds with Fra Ludovico, the ineffectual resident priest.
This innocent idyll comes to an end in 1502, when Cesare and Lucrezia come to Montefiore for a visit and demand that Vicente travel to Greece in order to recover a branch and three apples from the original Tree of Knowledge. Cesare believes that these apples came from a garden in Babylon and were stolen from a treasury near the Hagia Sophia based on information he received from Prince Dschem, younger brother of the Turkish Sultan Bayezid, but they were intercepted before Dschem could receive them and are currently in the treasury of Agion Oros, a Holy Mountain east of Thessaly. As for why the apples have to be retrieved by Vicente specifically, your guess is as good as mine, though it may simply come down to unlucky timing and proximity. I wouldn’t know. Cesare never sees fit to explain and neither does Maguire, which after Son of a Witch is not even close to a surprise. Whatever the reasoning, Vicente pressures Lucrezia into taking care of the seven-year-old Bianca, reminding her of Michelotto’s almost-murder, then sets out for Greece with the expectation that he will never return. Unbeknownst to all of them, he is followed by a dog-like creature that appears to be made entirely of rock, which has an agenda of its own. He eventually succeeds in finding the apples, surprising even himself, but he is promptly caught trying to steal them and is thrown into prison.
Four years later, Bianca is eleven years old, which means that in the eyes of the broken Cesare – deathly ill and hiding in Montefiore under Lucrezia’s care following the collapse of his military campaigns – she’s ripe for deflowering. After interrupting an attempted rape, a furious Lucrezia summons the huntsman Ranuccio Vecchia, grandson and only living relation of Primavera, and orders him to bring her Bianca’s heart in a casket. Ranuccio has a few questions, but not enough to prevent him from accepting both the commission and the reward money, and he abducts Bianca easily enough and drags her out into the woods, where he sets her free and tells her to run. He then presents Lucrezia with the heart of a deer and considers it a done deal, though he privately ditches the money she gave him. Elsewhere, Bianca flees as directed and lands in the hands of seven creatures of stone, who care for her – in a manner of speaking – while she lies in a coma for the next six years. (This part is never explained either. Go figure.) She finally wakes at the age of seventeen and immediately gives birth to six years’ worth of missed periods before settling into a kind of life with the opinionated rocks, which become less rock-like and more dwarf-like the longer she lives with them.
Meanwhile, Vicente languishes in the dungeons of Agion Oros until he is unexpectedly freed by the surprisingly endearing rock dog. With the help of this dog, he retrieves the apples and returns to Montefiore, where he finds Lucrezia firmly in control of the estate. Unfortunately, he also learns that all of his efforts have been pointless: Cesare died years ago during a battle that apparently required him to be naked, and Lucrezia has no interest in the two apples Vicente has brought back as proof of his success. (The third apple is sequestered in Venice; Vicente knew better than to return without some sort of insurance.) He gets even more bad news when Fra Ludovico, who has been feigning mental incompetence for years, informs him with surprising lucidity that Bianca disappeared six years ago and is presumed dead. Out of both of their sight, Lucrezia begs the mirror above the fireplace for validation but receives the exact opposite when the mirror instead shows her the seventeen-year-old Bianca, indifferent to questions of beauty and far more beautiful because of it.
Back in the cottage in the woods (only cottage-shaped because Bianca imagines it that way), Bianca and the dwarves are joined by Vicente’s rock dog, who turns out to be their missing brother Nextday. With his return, Bianca learns that the dwarves have spent years trying to recover a mirror they made to cure their ongoing existential crisis. The mirror was found in Montefiore’s Lago Verde and now hangs in Bianca’s former house, but the dwarves object to outright theft and have been trying to figure out a less dishonorable way of reclaiming the mirror. As they cannot seem to find one, they decide to try to develop themselves without the help of the mirror, and to that end they leave Bianca to her own devices while they tramp off to do whatever it is they need to do. While alone, she is found by Michelotto, who stumbles across her while looking for his runaway geese, and who then – with absolutely no intended malice – leads his enraged mother straight to Bianca’s door.
Having located the biggest thorn in her side at last, Lucrezia graciously sets out to destroy her; however, she didn’t know enough to factor in the dwarves, who revive Bianca when they find her dead, or nearly so, upon the floor of their house. Upon learning that the dwarves turned back from their mission when they realized they couldn’t maintain their present identities as dwarves without her imagination to sustain the illusion, Bianca urges them to steal the mirror to allow them to find their own identity. While they sneak into Montefiore to take the mirror back, Lucrezia sneaks back to the cottage twice more. After her second attempt falls flat, she poisons one of the apples from the Tree of Knowledge and returns to the cottage a third and final time. Though Bianca was firmly instructed by the exasperated dwarves not to let anyone into the house, Lucrezia gets around this stricture with an impassioned plea for medical assistance for Michelotto (whom, it must be noted, she put out of commission herself in order to trick Bianca). With the full knowledge of Lucrezia’s identity and reputation for nasty poisons, Bianca eats the apple, knowing she would rather die than listen to any more of Lucrezia’s bullshit. This seems to do the trick.
As for the dwarves, they get the mirror back but return to find Bianca dead on the floor for a third time, so I guess it’s win-lose. With nothing else for it, they build her a glass-topped coffin and set her out on a hill, which they guard religiously. Vicente visits as well, though he begins to show signs of declining mental health, while the dwarves themselves begin to solidify and age in ways that are unfamiliar to them. Seven years later, Lucrezia finally dies in childbirth at the age of thirty-nine, frantically demanding that she be taken to Venice to claim the third apple, which she believes will save her life; however, this never actually comes to pass, though she is taken through the canals of Venice by some sort of psychopomp during her final moments of consciousness. (Fever dream or actual journey across her own personal Styx? We’ll never know. Doesn’t really matter.)
Sometime after that death, Bianca awakens in a circle of now-elderly dwarves at a kiss from Ranuccio, of all people. We only ever saw them together during the abduction and there’s no particular reason they should have any sort of attachment when the narrative itself admits that they know of each other but they’ve never really interacted – again, outside of the abduction – but I guess that’s what we’re going with. The kiss is Ranuccio’s apology. They’re now devoted to each other. It’s weird, especially when he’s old enough to be her father. Either way, Ranuccio wakes Bianca with a kiss, elbowing an eager Michelotto out of the way in order to get to her coffin, and they return to Montefiore (leaving a weeping Michelotto in the dust), where Bianca finally reunites with a man I’m assuming is her father. I say “assuming” because the sky’s the limit with Maguire, so she could just as easily have been greeted by the pig boy.
Maguire’s prose is gorgeous. The way he writes is beautiful, lyrical, legendary, such stuff as dreams are made on, mildly envy-inducing, and it kept my finger off the DNF button. As is usually the case with me and him, I like his vision; I am particularly intrigued by the idea that Bianca’s imagination shapes the insular home of the magical rocks, right down to the rocks themselves, who steadily become more solid as they spend more time with her. One quibble: the dwarves say they moved their home for the purposes of catching Bianca in her flight, and I’m not really clear on their motives when they don’t know her from Eve; nor is it obvious why she immediately lapses into a six-year coma. “It’s a fairy tale, shut up” will not be accepted as a potential answer. Yet even if I have more questions than answers, Maguire’s imagination is wild, and I appreciate the world and the story in concept at least.
Those are the only positive things I can say about this book, upon which I am so glad I had the good sense not to spend money. Bless the library for existing, and for having a readily available electronic copy of this book. I will admit that I was tempted for a while to buy a physical copy because I am shockingly easy to sway if the writing in question is as gorgeous as Maguire’s, but the six-year menses and the ending killed that idea between them. Frankly, if there really had to be a while-you-were-sleeping kiss – and it’s a Snow White retelling published in the early aughts, so obviously there did – Michelotto would have made far more sense than Ranuccio. He may be simple-minded and easy to panic, but he has Lucrezia’s beauty and he seems to have his heart in the right place, and he’s actually an appropriate age for Bianca. We see Bianca spend actual time with Michelotto and we see them rekindling their childhood friendship, even going so far as to call each other their own dearest friend, but nothing ever comes of that. I would have thought that the perfect ending would be some sort of union between Bianca and Michelotto, which would serve the dual purpose of burying the Borgia-Nevada feud while also absolutely boiling the deceased Lucrezia’s piss – no? Just me?
As for our pointedly innocent sleeping beauty, I suppose she’s all right. It’s hard to pinpoint her personality, because she doesn’t have one. After finishing the book, I know that she loves her father; she is inclined to help those in need; she is overly trusting; she can’t cook (according to the dwarves), or then again maybe she can. It’s never clear if the horrid soup is due to her incompetence in the kitchen or merely a difference in taste palates. I have no idea how she would react to any problem outside of the range of her story. There’s no character growth to speak of, because, again, I know so little about her. We spend more time in Lucrezia’s head than we do in Bianca’s, which seems to defeat the purpose of the book. It doesn’t feel like Bianca’s story; it feels like Lucrezia’s story, and Vicente’s, and the dwarves’. But Bianca herself is so unmemorable that, coming into this reread, all I remembered with any sort of clarity was that there was a scene in which Lucrezia was sitting in front of the mirror feeling sad and old and possibly reminiscing on her relations with her father and/or brother (so basically just every scene with Lucrezia in it), and there was a scene in which Bianca cooked soup for the dwarves and they hated it. That was my strongest memory: sadness and soup. The rest of the story was a nebulous thing, then as now.
Though I did not have fond memories of this book and certainly didn’t expect to come out the other end with a newfound appreciation for it, especially considering what happened when I read Son of a Witch, I was – perhaps unwisely – expecting a little something more than that. If my expectations for the story weren’t particularly high, my earlier encounter with Elphaba made me hope for lovable female characters. But that didn’t happen either. Bianca is, as I’ve mentioned, a blank space where a woman should be. Maguire’s Lucrezia is unerringly faithful to her own most classic portrayal as a venomous, incestuous femme fatale: not that she doesn’t have her moments of humanity, but it’s no great feat to look at a beautiful, powerful woman and imagine the insecurity and jealousy and miscellaneous inner turmoil that are purported to come with the station. The one female character I did love was Primavera, whose sharp-tongued irreverence carried me through Bianca’s childhood, but then she unceremoniously lost her tongue and never spoke again. Is this character development?
Five years ago I decreed that Maguire’s books were not for me, and this reread did not change my mind. I stand by that earlier decision 100%. Even if there were no skarks to throw me off in this one, Maguire is liberal with the Italian vocabulary and unexplained location names, most of which did not turn up in my Kindle’s Wikipedia search, and – as with Wicked and Son of a Witch – there is a lot of rambling that fills in background details but doesn’t do anything for the story in the long run. From the bottom of my heart, I did not need to know about that one time Ranuccio jizzed in front of a unicorn, I mean, jeez, dude, keep that to yourself. I don’t care that imminent bloodshed gives Cesare an instant hard-on. I did not need to watch Bianca give birth to a literal ocean of blood. I don’t know what purpose that scene served, symbolically or otherwise, and it just read like a nasty case of PCOS. As someone who has given figurative birth to giant blood clots, I sympathize entirely. I guess I’ll give Maguire credit for his apparent lack of fear surrounding menstrual monstrosities – he is not a writer to shy away from the grotesque or the merely gross – but I still didn’t need to read about it. I am not joking about those sympathetic crampy twinges.
In conclusion: would I read it again? No, of course not. It’s just slightly on the wrong side of super gross, the female characters are mostly bland stereotypes, the beautiful prose isn’t enough to save it from itself, and I still hate the ending. I should’ve trusted my own judgment from fifteen years ago, even knowing full well that I probably didn’t really get it. That is all very well, but now I’m fifteen years older and I still don’t get it. I suppose for some readers and some authors there is no magical time at which we’ll just suddenly click, and theoretically that’s fine. But maybe next time I’ll spare myself the headache, and I won’t try to second-guess myself with an author who is provably, demonstrably, just not my type.
