Snow & Rose

Emily Winfield Martin's Snow & Rose is a fairy tale for 8 year olds about two sisters who move to a cottage deep in the woods that swallowed up their father.

What happens

Rose is eleven, dark-haired and careful. Snow is nine, pale-haired and wild. They used to live in a grand old home where the garden was half white flowers and half red, one side for each of them.

Then one day their father rode off among the trees and only his horse came home. Their mother sank into her sadness, the house was taken away, and the three of them moved to an old stone cottage among the trees.

It opens with Rose telling Snow "the story of us" in the dark at bedtime. It's such a lovely way in. You feel straight away how much they've lost, and how differently the two of them carry it. Rose is sure their father isn't coming back. Snow simply refuses to believe it.

Then the girls leave the path. There are bandits on the hillside and wolves after dark. There's a Librarian with a wooden leg and a pair of goats, whose library has no books in it at all (just shelves and shelves of tiny objects, each one a story). And under the ground lives a boy called Ivo who grows glowing mushrooms and plays the fiddle. Snow insists it's a violin.

It reads like a proper old fairy tale, full of hush and wonder. Even the trees are watching the sisters, and whispering that something big is coming.

The sadness is very real, though. Their father is gone before the story starts, and the servants whisper about what might have killed him. Their mother is so low she barely notices where the girls are. There's a frightening wolf chase, and a wolf is shot with an arrow.

For a child who has lost someone, this might be one to read together. For a reader who loves stories with real feeling and a bit of magic in the dark, it's something very special.

What to read next

For more old stories told in a brand new way, Hilary McKay's Fairy Tales begins with two children working for a whole week to buy a trapped little bird.