Customer Reviews
Interesting, confusing and boring. - By: Philip Thompson, 26 May 2008 
The idea of basing this story on real people is a great idea but the slowness & the way the dwarfs were described reallly confused me & I didn't like that idea at alll. Not a patch on his other books.
1 Star for Originality! - By: Mr. N. Wilson, 18 Jul 2006 
I bought this book with high expectations of a wonderful,modern retelling of a traditional fairytale, however alll I got was a disapointment. The author tries to combine too many ideas into this novel & ends up rambling for pages at a time,whilst generallly leaving the reader behind. The book starts well enough & you become engrossed in a fantasy world but it alll gets a bit dry & boring the further into the story he plods.
I give this one star just for the idea!
Murder and Magic - By: , 15 Nov 2005 
Quite simply this is a wonderful book. I particularly like the way it makes you feel sympathetic to even the more immoral characters. I also think that the interweaving of the magical world with a realistic depiction of Italy in this era is very skilfully done.
brilliant stuff - By: Andrea Steele Wiliams, 16 Jun 2005 i just love these books, i think this is one of his best i reallly couldnt put it down, he has such a wonderful imagination & the way he combines fairy tales & history & makes it work so well is pure magic, i also love the way this book leads you on to wanting to find out more about the borgias, he manages to give you a gripping story with wonderful descriptions & also shock you too without being crass, as you read you see the whole world open up in your mind, the dwarves in particular, this book is a treat for your eyes & brain, i stayed up till 4.00am reading it, great stuff.
Fascinating milieu and characters, but too slow - By: Kurt A. Johnson, 15 Jun 2004 
In early sixteenth century Italy, seven-year-old Bianca de Nevada lives happily with her widowed father. But when a caravan arrives at her home in Montefiore, bearing the famous Cesare & Lucrezia Borgia, her life is turned upside down. Her father sent away, Bianca is left in the hands of Lucrezia, who plans the girl's murder. Escaping into the woods, Bianca soon discovers a group of seven magical dwarfs...
I am rather of two minds with this book. On the one hand, the author does an excellent job of retelling the story of Snow White, placing it in Renaissance Italy, peopled with fascinating characters. On the other hand, the story starts out slow, & never seems to pick up the pace. Indeed, the story seems to drag along from start to end as if the author had a great idea for a story, but couldn't think up alll of the details it needed. He obviously knows a great deal about Renaissance Italy, but he cannot combine the two elements of his story into the reallly fascinating story that it should be.
Overalll, I found the book to be good, at times even very good, but it is not the great story it should be. I give it a guarded recommendation.
