Hemlock and Silver

• Author: T. Kingfisher
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publication Date: August 19, 2025
• Publisher: Tor Books/Macmillan Audio

Thank you to NetGalley, Tor Books, and Macmillan Audio for providing me an ARC of the ebook and audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Hemlock & Silver, a dark reimagining of “Snow White” steeped in poison, intrigue, and treason of the most magical kind.

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.

LeahsBooks confession: I am hopelessly addicted to any and everything that T. Kingfisher writes. I periodically stalk NetGalley to see if there’s anything new from her, and there often is, since she is quite the prolific writer. At least it gives me her backlist to work through while waiting for approval for new books like this one. I was so juiced to read this one, and let me tell you, this is another hit that could only come from the mind of T. Kingfisher. She breathed new life into the Snow White story with her unique take on it.

I received both ebook and audiobook copies, and I listened to this one mainly as an ebook simply because I didn’t want to stop reading to do the boring things in my day, like go to appointments and run errands. It is narrated by Jennifer Pickens and I love how she infused Anja’s character with the snark implied in the print version. She does a great job of voicing Anja and all the other characters believably.

As many of Kingfisher’s heroines do, Anja lives a peaceful life free of interruptions that take her focus away from her own work: finding cures to poisons that don’t have a cure. We get a little insight into why Anja does this from her younger days, when her cousin accidentally mistook a root vegetable for a poison right in front of her. Seeing the pain that it caused her cousin as well as her family, she vowed to find cures for those substances that people have accepted as fatal. It quickly offers a plausible reasoning for why she researches poison so thoroughly, especially when she finds herself testing the cures on herself. She justifies this by trying the cure on fowl beforehand, but it still places her at a pretty significant risk. 

While Anja is puttering away in her little version of paradise, she is summoned to attend to the King, whose daughter is dying, and he’s ready to try anything, which apparently includes summoning an expert on poisons and their antidotes, over bleeding and other methods that have not been shown effective for poor Snow. Anja is brought to the castle by a grumpy guard and her supplies. Instead of jumping to a conclusion, Anja begins to work methodically, examining every single thing that the girl could have come into contact with by any means to identify what is making her sick. 

But as hard as Anja tries, she can’t find anything that could be the cause of Snow’s symptoms. Until she discovers a magic mirror that is a portal to a whole other world, and is forced to explore the dark world to find the poison so she can find an antidote. She winds up being saddled with a one-eyed cat that winds up being beneficial, along with her grumpy guard, who Anja is clearly growing on.

I loved Anja right from the start. She seems to be in the typical European fairy tale setting, but has a special fondness for the scientific method, which didn’t seem to occur to anyone else. Instead, Anja identifies a poison and tries to find a potential cure based on various metrics of comparison. If that doesn’t work, she is back to the drawing board, while if it does, she tries it on a rooster (reluctantly because she’s an animal lover and despises animal testing), and if that works, she tries it on herself. So naturally, she brings her scientific mind to the castle and upends everything in Snow’s life—monitoring and even tasting her food and drinks, checking all of her belongings, and doing everything that would make anyone, especially a teenage princess, feel as though they have no privacy. And Snow was right; even Anja recognizes and admits that, trying to come to some kind of solution. 

Perhaps the thing I loved the most about Anja is her witty sarcasm. She constantly has snarky comments that she thinks of saying but tries to keep inside because they probably wouldn’t be appreciated. It had me laughing at identifying with her practical, no-nonsense approach at life. Anja isn’t a young woman, probably in her 30s, and has that typical ‘ugh, what now’ approach to things that is so recognizable for readers who have left their 20s behind. We spend nearly half the book just getting to know Anja and watching her do her usual methodical work, which was fine because I adored her character and couldn’t get enough of her. 

Once Anja arrives at the castle, she is promptly assigned two guards, one of whom became a love interest. I really liked the way it developed between them, feeling natural and the opposite of insta-lust…which would be developing a working relationship first and then slowly sliding into a bit of a romance. However, it never overpowers the main plot line and I really had fun seeing Anja and Javier interacting and getting to know each other more and more as they continued to work together. Aside from the handful of side characters, I was surprised that there weren’t more. Kingfisher books tend to have a wider range of side characters than this one did, and I was a little disappointed not to get even more characters to know through Kingfisher’s words. 

The pacing was a lot slower in the first half of the book, when Anja is introduced and is getting her footing in the castle, while after the discovery of the magic mirror and alternate world, things move a lot faster. At times I found myself a little more confused and having to reread something, but I was mostly just blown away by how Kingfisher took the barest elements of the story of Snow White (magic mirror, apples, and an evil queen) yet made this story completely her own by placing those elements squarely in the middle of one of her cozy horror/fantasy stories to create Hemlock and Silver instead.

Overall, this was a good book. It just didn’t happen to be one of my favorites by Kingfisher (see Nettle and Bone or A House With Good Bones for books that were more up my alley. This one wasn’t a disappointment at all—I couldn’t wait to find out what was going to happen next from start to finish. I love a good talking animal character in the cast, and this one had it, along with a lot of the elements I’m used to seeing in Kingfisher books, but the pacing and just a little bit more development of the characters, considering how few there were, didn’t resonate with me. I’m still a hardcore Kingfisher fan though, even if this makes me want to go back and reread Nettle and Bone or Briony and Roses.

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