I received a digital ARC from the publisher via NetGalley for review. 
 Video version of this review here: https://youtu.be/pgq-ziqNaQo 
 This is a standalone YA Snow White retelling that impressively sets out to challenge a fundamental premise of the story, the female rivalry between the queen and the princess. Can both of these women be protagonists? And can their relationship be founded on love instead of jealousy? This feels like such a necessary revisionist take, and I loved so much of what the author did with the fairytale, but there were times when the execution felt sloppy and underwhelming. 
 In a kingdom where the north has long been cursed to eternal winter, Princess Lynet feels stifled by the legacy of her mother, and by her father's insistence that she will follow in the footsteps of the dead queen. She feels that her father doesn't see her for who she really is because he can't see past her superficial resemblance to a woman she never knew. In alternating chapters, we meet Lynet's stepmother Mina as a teenager coming to court from her home in the south when Lynet was still a baby. The socially alienated daughter of the feared magician Gregory, she is told that since he replaced her weak heart with one of glass, she will be forever unable to feel love or be truly loved in return. Though obviously untrue, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because Mina believes it. She learns to scheme and manipulate because she doesn't believe that any other road to happiness is open to her. Both girls owe their lives to Gregory's dark magic and are burdened by the weight of that knowledge, but it also gives them powers of their own that they may need in order to break free. Both are also damaged by the vastly different yet equally harmful actions of both the magician and the king, neither of whom understand their daughters at all. Bashardoust introduces her protagonists in a loving mother-daughter relationship, then shows piece by painful piece every trauma from the past and present that seems to doom them to be rivals. The long and tumultuous arc of this relationship is the consistent focus throughout, which is great since I love character-driven stories, but other aspects of the book seem to suffer from neglect in the meanwhile. 
 Neither the prose nor the dialogue come across as particularly strong, for starters. There is almost no attempt whatsoever at world-building or complex politics and intrigue, which I'm honestly happy without in a fairy tale story, but I need a stronger sense of atmosphere and narrative voice for that choice to make sense. Bashardoust's writing is middle-of-the-road at best, and I couldn't help feeling like the book needed something better. 
 The exclusive focus on Lynet and Mina also left several critical side characters woefully underdeveloped, most notably Lynet's love interest Nadia, who arrives at court as the new surgeon at the age of seventeen and promptly begins performing amputations and such (!!!!!). The super-skilled-teenage-doctor thing needed way more than the surface-level explanations we got in order for me to buy it, and it was especially odd to me that the characters in the book were more taken aback by her gender (when there isn't any other explicit sexism on display) than by her age. And Nadia is just one of several supporting characters from whom I would have appreciated a POV chapter or two (Felix, anybody?). Yes, this is Lynet and Mina's book, but as it delved deeper and deeper, I couldn't help but think that seeing how some other characters perceived the two of them could have actually added a great deal of clarity to their story. 
 In addition, there were a couple of bits that just seemed obviously sloppy to me. For example, there is a scene in which Lynet is being hunted down by a search party in a snowy wood, and though they come mighty close to finding her, there is no mention of whether or not she has been leaving footprints in the snow. Another similarly silly oversight is too spoiler-y to mention, but you get the general idea. 
 On the bright side, I don't think that the things I found lacking in the writing would have bothered me at all when I was a teenager myself, so I actually feel pretty confident in recommending this bold revisionist Snow White to younger readers who are, after all, the target demographic. 
 And yes, there are definite Frozen feels. And no, I don't consider that a bad thing at all. :-)