[Review] Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust

Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust

Rating: 3.5 

Published: September 5th 2017

Goodreads Synopsis:

Frozen meets The Bloody Chamber in this feminist fantasy reimagining of the Snow White fairytale.
At sixteen, Mina's mother is dead, her magician father is vicious, and her silent heart has never beat with love for anyone has never beat at all, in fact, but shed always thought that fact normal. She never guessed that her father cut out her heart and replaced it with one of glass. When she moves to Whitespring Castle and sees its king for the first time, Mina forms a plan: win the kings heart with her beauty, become queen, and finally know love. The only catch is that shell have to become a stepmother.
Fifteen-year-old Lynet looks just like her late mother, and one day she discovers why: a magician created her out of snow in the dead queens image, at her fathers order. But despite being the dead queen made flesh, Lynet would rather be like her fierce and regal stepmother, Mina. She gets her wish when her father makes Lynet queen of the southern territories, displacing Mina. Now Mina is starting to look at Lynet with something like hatred, and Lynet must decide what to do and who to be to win back the only mother shes ever known or else defeat her once and for all.
Entwining the stories of both Lynet and Mina in the past and present, Girls Made of Snow and Glass traces the relationship of two young women doomed to be rivals from the start. Only one can win all, while the other must lose everything unless both can find a way to reshape themselves and their story.

I've been reading so many fairytale retellings and it's hard to keep track of them. But this Frozen/Snow White one was so pure and sweet.

Mina is the stepmother of Lynet, who wants only to love, as she has a heart made of glass. Lynet, who was crafted in the image of her dead mother, is made from snow. The two are pitted against each other, as only one can be Queen of Whitespring.


There are many callbacks to fairytales we know and love - the Huntsman, Felix, is madly in love with Mina, who created him. And just as Elsa commands ice, so too do Lynet and Mina respectively command snow and glass.

It is a bit slow in the beginning because the first 100 or so pages are flipping back and forth between Mina and Lynet - Mina, when she was much younger and just starting to live at Whitespring. It's a lot of backstory here that takes a lot of time to explain.

While it is admittedly slow, I couldn't help but love how Mina and Lynet loved each other, despite all the people who were against Lynet viewing Mina as her stepmother. Lynet always looked up to her, and never viewed her as a wicked stepmother, which is a big difference from many previous fairytales.

Hadn't Mina kept her own secrets rather than use them for anyone's good by her own? If Lynet wanted to match her stepmother's fierceness, to be stronger than she used to be, then she would have to learn to keep her own secrets as well. 

The fact that they didn't hate each other brought an interesting aspect to the narrative. It all seemed like one big misunderstanding - so the tension wasn't all that it was chocked up to be, because in the end, love won out.

Still, it was a beautiful feminist retelling where all our heroines got their happy endings.