REVIEW // Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust
★★★☆☆
🌟 HIDDEN GEM 🌟
I WANTED TO LOVE THIS BOOK!!! I REALLY DID!!!
There were some parts that really blew me away-passages where Bashardoust deftly explores the themes of love and feminism in a fairy tale format. I was especially impressed with some of Mina's chapters, where we really got to reflect on the agency and role of women in storytelling. Relationships among female characters are so often misused by authors, and I was incredibly pleased to find a story where the trope of girls hating on other girls for the sake of "girl power" or easy conflict was completely turned on its head. These were the parts that blew me away:
(SPOILER) Mina didn’t know if he meant Lynet or Emilia, and she wasn’t sure if Nicholas knew, either, or if they had come together to form one beautiful dead woman, far from his reach. He’d love me, too, if I were dead, Mina thought. For all the bitterness that lay between them, she knew that if she died on the spot, he would weep for her. He would mold her memory into a wife he could love, and he would worship her dead body just as he had shunned the living one. He loves nothing so much as his own grief. (SPOILER END)
Those few glimpses into the potential of this book, however, is what made it all the more disappointing.
image: detail of January (14th century), Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trento
I believe this is Bashardoust's debut novel, so I'm looking forward to picking up Girl, Serpent, Thorn to see just how much her writing has improved-because I really was not on board with her style in this book. There is quite a bit of repetition:
Lynet didn’t remain lying in the snow too long—she didn’t want anyone to come passing by and find her there, especially not Nadia. She knew Nadia had nothing to do with her birth—her creation—but Nadia was the one who had told her, and so Lynet blamed her for it anyway.
And if Lynet wanted to prove that, then she had to stand still for once and make a choice—just as she had to trust Mina to make her choice. Only their choices would determine who they were in the end.
But more importantly, there are so many instances of telling the reader something rather than showing. Because the relationship between Lynet and Mina is so central to the book, I expected it to be developed fully. Yet so many of its intricacies, and of the arcs of the characters themselves, are simply stated in sentences that pop up whenever the author needs us to know that the dynamics between two characters have changed or than a specific character has grown in some way. Adding to the fact that so much of this book is tied up in internal monologues and reflection, it often feels jarring to spend entire chapters in a characters mind only to have them make a decision or statement soon after which we have not seen them consider before. For example, at one point Lynet states:
(SPOILER) “I have power over snow,” Lynet said. “I can transform it and tell it what to do. I think … I think I could make the snow stop falling, if I wanted.”
At this point, we know that she has powers over snow, but she has never really thought about how this could be used to stop the curse. This statement comes right after we have passed considerable time seeing Lynet's train of thought, and her sudden "oh, here's a way to put an end to this major conflict" was so out of the blue. (END SPOILER)
At another point, Lynet says:
(SPOILER) "I know,” Lynet answered. “But I’m ready now. I know what kind of queen I want to be.”
But again, you can't simply TELL us that. We haven't seen any actual character development beyond Lynet going from place A to Place B and the author tellings us that after this arduous day trip she is suddenly much more mature and ready to be queen. (END SPOILER)
There are also two romances in this book that I really couldn't get invested in. As nice as it is to see wlw relationships, at this point I have read many other much more well-developed ones than this. I really did not feel that there was any chemistry between Nadia and Lynet, and their romance only seemed to take away from the plot surrounding the relationship between Lynet and Mina. I felt the same way with Mina and the Hunstman, although I did feel like their interactions served to show us Mina's internal struggles and growth in a way that Lynet/Nadia didn't. I kind of felt that the romances in the book were overall redundant, and I wish they hadn't been inserted as they seem to take away from the rest of the plot.
Overall, this book showed a lot of potential, but the plot, characters, and world were not developed with enough care to truly fulfill the purpose of the story.
3/5: I WANTED TO LOVE THIS BOOK!!! I REALLY DID!!! There were some parts that really blew me away-passages where Bashardoust deftly explore
