A really spiky, rich reimagining of the Snow White and Rose Red fairytale. No, not the sleeping princess Snow White: the one with the two sisters, the dwarf, and the bear. The beginning seems unpromisingly harsh with a really gruesome incest plot, and I feared the book was going in the direction of Robin McKinley's awful book Deerskin (which you should avoid if you haven't) but from there it gets extremely interesting and quite funny and beautiful in a consistently quirky way, and the awful incest business isn't there to serve a victim's revenge plot--it's more of a Yeatsian worldview where awfulness is inevitable but productive.

If all fairytale retellings were this sophisticated, I would read more of them. The writing's very good too. And the bears could be their own book.