It's been so long since I read this for the first time. This was published in 2009, though I don't think I read it that early. I'm pretty sure I remember getting it along with the second in the series, which is about the Beast. Ah, yes. I love Amazon's record keeping. Right there on the item page it says I purchased this in August 2015. So 6 years after it was published and the one about the Beast had also been out a year at that point.
I knew Serena Valentino from Gloomcookie, a goth comic book series. Maybe someday I'll track down all the collections. I think I only had two. Serena also did the Nightmares & Fairy Tales comic series, which I bought much later than when they came out. So she has the darker mind that works well for darker fairy tales.
I did a short entry here after reading the second book in the series, which mentioned that I didn't care for this one...and that still mostly holds true.
The book follows how the Wicked Queen became so wicked because she wasn't originally. She was the daughter of the most famous mirror maker in the land and when the king visited his shop, he fell in love with the girl after the death of Snow White's mother. The early chapters are nice with the queen getting to know Snow and the little family having fun times. But the king keeps riding off into war and each time, it becomes harder on the queen. Finally, he dies in battle which breaks her.
The king has three "odd sisters" who are supposed to be his cousins but likely aren't really. They're triplets named Lucinda, Ruby and Martha. These three turn out to be witches and it's them behind the molding of the Wicked Queen. When she was still alive, the queen's mother wished for a child. Her husband, the mirror maker, bargained with the odd sisters, trading his soul for a pregnancy. Unfortunately, his wife died after birth and he spent his entire life tormenting and abusing the little girl who would become the queen. So the queen comes from an abusive background. Then even in death, he works with the odd sisters to control the queen. He is the face in her magic mirror. She still craves his approval, though it's also become her holding power over him, forcing him to say that she's the fairest when all she heard from him in her youth was that she was ugly. So now we've got victim gaining power over her abuser. The queen learns witchcraft from the odd sisters and is driven down an obsessive path to true evil by their hand and her father's. The sisters use a spell on her to drive her to her final act: trying to kill Snow White.
So we've got a sympathetic character who was abused in childhood and then found love, only for her husband to constantly neglect his wife and child. I blame him for part of this, too. He abandoned her and Snow over and over. She was an easy tool for the odd sisters to transform. The constant chapters on her depression and descent into madness were boring though and you read through all of them and the sisters still have to use a spell to truly turn the queen evil!
In the end, she repents of her actions. The sisters appear when she's still a crone and say she can run into the forest and escape or she can run to the cliff, which will lead to certain death. The queen chooses that path, regretting what she's done and what she's made of her life. After Snow is married, she gets the magic mirror and inside it, she sees her stepmother, who tells her she always loved her and always will. It's a nice little ending.
I'm not sure how I feel about it overall. Not every villain needs a sympathetic backstory that explains what drove them to evil. Some people simply are evil. And I don't tend to like the abused becoming abuser trope. I do like the addition of the odd sisters though because they're going to keep coming back. At least if there has to be some driving force behind the creation of all the Disney villains, it's interesting. This one was very slow-paced but it's probably worth starting the series here just to have the full picture of it all.
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