Hemlock & Silver, by T. Kingfisher

[rachelmanija]

After disliking both The Hollow Places and The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher, and for similar reasons (idiot heroine who refused to believe in magic when it was happening right in front of her; annoying tone), I gave up on her works. But since lots of my customers like her, I ordered this book. And when it arrived, it was so beautiful that I had to pick it up and examine it. And then I figured I'd read a couple pages, just to get an idea of what it was about. Those couple pages quickly turned into the first chapter. Then the second. The next thing I knew, I was actually enjoying the book, and finished it with great pleasure.

Anja is a scientist specializing in poisons and antidotes, who regularly takes small doses of poison to understand their effects and test out antidotes. She saves the lives of poisoned people, sometimes. This gets her enough fame that one day the king shows up, asking her to save his daughter, Snow, who he believes is being poisoned...

This is a very loose retelling of "Snow White," making clever use of elements like the apple, the mirror, and the poison.

Like the other books of hers I read, this one is set in an unambiguously magical world and/or has a portal to an unambiguously magical world, and has a heroine who doesn't believe in magic. I guess this is an obligatory Kingfisher thing? At least in this one, Anja doesn't deny that things are happening when they're clearly happening, she just thinks that maybe there is some underlying scientific explanation. This makes at least some sense, as she's a scientist. (Though in my opinion, science is basically a framework and a worldview, and a scientist in a magical world would be doing experiments to figure out how magic works, not denying its existence.) In any case, Anja does not act like an idiot or a flat earther, but pursues the clues she finds and doesn't deny what they suggest. She's kind of monomaniacal, but in a fun way.

Hemlock & Silver meshes multiple genres. It's not a horror novel or even particularly dark for a fantasy, but it has some genuinely scary moments. It's often very funny. And one aspect of the story, while technically fantasy, is so methodically worked out and involves so much science (optics) that it feels like science fiction. There's also a murder mystery, a romance, a surprisingly agreeable rooster, and a talking cat. It all works together quite nicely.

Comments

[heavenscalyx]

That's interesting -- I haven't read The Seventh Bride, but I admit I was impatient with the protag in The Hollow Places (her gay sidekick was much more entertaining). But I've read both What Moves the Dead and What Feasts At Night and, though they kind of have sciencey explanations, there's also some handwavy magic in there (more in the first than the second). And all her White Rat books are set in an explicitly fantasy realm. So maybe it's just her series of retold fairy tales?

[rachelmanija]

Do the protagonists of the White Rat books believe in magic?

[edenfalling]

Yes they do! Also miracles, because that setting has gods who often tangibly affect the world.

The magic mostly takes the form of "wonderworkers" who each have a highly specific and idiosyncratic magical gift, but there are also leftover pieces of magitech ("wonder engines") from a lost ancient civilization that nobody really understands. Some people study those.

[estara]

Can also recommend the White Rat books as magical people with gods and some lovely romance, but also elements of horror. T. Kingfisher is an alias for Ursula Vernon, by the way.

[mikeda]

One point is that although she DOES live in an unambiguously magical world, she doesn't realize this at the beginning of the book. Most people's lives in the world of the book don't interact with actual magic (although BELIEF in magic is widespread, things that are believed to be magic generally aren't actually magic and the heroine is well aware of this).

[rachelmanija]

Yes, that made it a lot less annoying.

[james]

This sounds interesting. I've bounced off every one of her books I've tried to read, but perhaps I should try this one from the library. (I found that her characters in completely different books still felt like the same people - her main female character always felt like the same person with a different hat. But the dynamics between characters felt predictable after the first book of hers that I tried.)

[lilacsigil]

That sounds great - I enjoyed "A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking" but there's no question about magic existing in that world, just very different and interesting ideas about how it works. I haven't read the ones where the main character doesn't believe magic exists, which would annoy me, but this sounds more like a Scully from the X-Files level of skepticism.

[carbonel]

My favorite Kingfisher books are the ones set in the world of the White Rat, especially Swordheart. But she has an entirely different writing feature than the not-believing in magic that drives me nuts: Her romance plots are always driven by the characters on both sides of the relationship believing themselves entirely unsuitable for romance and love for one reason or another, so the person paying attention to them can't actually be in love, oh no. Mostly I just skim over those bits because they're so predictable.

[chomiji]

I liked this book more than I liked her last several. In fact, I liked the hell out of it, but then started coming up with nitpicks the second I finished. Like, after all this interesting worldbuilding, why are sandwiches the default food?

I have a lot of patience for the White Rat setting, especially the Saint of Steel subseries. They do tend to be utterly predictable as far as the romance plots go, though. But the paladins of the Saint of Steel are my people. I identify with them more than is sensible, given my actual existence. (But then, I identified with Sha Gojyo too.)

She does tend to come up with some new intellectual fascinations, then hang her usual characters and plots on them. She almost admits this in a lot of her author's notes at the ends of her books.