Snow White and Rose Red, Patricia C. Wrede

As I was searching the children's section for Briar Rose, I stumbled upon a few books I had not read by Patricia C. Wrede. Wrede writes fun young adult books, full of magic, confusion, and spunky heroines. Being in the mood for fun and not too much thought, I picked up another book in the Fairy Tale series of Briar Rose, Snow White and Red Rose.

Snow White and Red Rose is not the same fairy tale as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. So I didn't actually know the fairy tale of the book. Wrede interspersed bits of the fairy tale with her story, so that I read it slowly throughout the novel, but I think part of the joy of the story was lost on me.

The novel is set in Elizabethan England, in a world that combines traditional idea of Faerie with a historical fear of witchcraft. Two girls and their mother get inadvertently involved in a vortex of human wizardry and Faerie drama. Wrede uses rather Shakespearean language (this is the only place I've read "an" to mean "if" outside of the Bard), which jarred with her accessible prose at first. Once I got past it, I enjoyed the novel, from an "I want something simple and engrossing to take my mind off the housing hunt" perspective.