Tried the first few chapters when trying to decide on next read but couldn't really connect with it. It felt like it read a bit younger than I normally tend to read which is a shame because normally I am a sucker for fairy tale retellings.

This was a book that I Really enjoyed this read and I would recommend to others easily, I will be looking out for other titles by this author.

Enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed Stepsister. A light funny and thought provoking take on a well known fairytale (which rather skips over the necrophilia aspect of the original story thankfully!) Snow White’s adventures whilst slumbering are an interesting touch.

A creepy, disturbing and incredibly cool feminist loose re-telling of Snow White. I absolutely loved reading this book and have thought about it a lot since. Suitable for 11+ readers who don't mind things a bit creepy and dark.

I am a sucker for a good fairytale retelling and 2020 has been a great year for them. So, when I found about about Snow White retelling – Poisoned, I knew it was a book I would love to read. Snow White is one of my favourite fairytales so I was intrigued to see how this retelling would go.

Sophie is about to come of age and inherit the throne, left to her by her father. Sophie’s stepmother, on the other hand, wants to get rid of her, believing Sophie to be too weak to reign over their kingdom. When her stepmother orders her huntsman to kill Sophie, Sophie, with the help of some dwarves, soon starts to fight back and is on her way to reclaiming what is rightfully hers.

Poisoned is a unique retelling of a classic fairytale, but also leaves behind the charm and charisma that we have come to love with the original Snow White story. The author certainly lets the blackness and corruption within the story take the spotlight, and this, in turn, gives it a gritty and murky feel. The distinctive way the story is told, through the point of view of Sophie, and also from a mysterious onlooker captures your interest and wills you to carry on reading the book until the very end.

The plot itself is twisted and at times filled with gloom and a bit of despair. From the moment you start reading you are dropped straight into the brunt of it, and get that feeling that you are at the start of a fast-paced story, filled with action and consequence. As you may expect from a fairytale retelling you do get the same characters, although slightly different than you have come to know and love. In this case, the seven dwarves. The way they work to save Sophie by giving her a mechanical heart, and how they work to keep her best interests at heart, despite Sophie not listening at times, definitely originates with the original tale. Also, the way that we go deeper into the backstory of the evil queen struck a chord with me. As well as fairytale retellings, I do love a villain origin story, and I feel that we got a bit of this within Poisoned.

Sophie certainly grows throughout the story. When we first meet her she is naive, eager to fall in love, and gullible. Believing everything that her stepmother says about her, she lacks confidence and doesn’t know if she’ll ever be strong enough to stand up for herself. However, as the story moves along you start to see little snippets of Sophie changing and come to the end she is confident, strong, brave and willing to fight for what is rightfully hers. Also, despite there, being a romantic subplot within the story, this doesn’t deter from the overall plot, and I guarantee that Sophie would still have had the same character growth, without the romance added.

Poisoned was a unique retelling of Snow White which had me, for the most part fully engaged. Donnelly certainly has a way of bringing new light to stories that we have grown up with and loved, and I for one, wonder what fairy tale she will be retelling next.

As a person who loves a good fairytale retelling I had hope for this book. I also love a narrative with a dark twist.
Poisoned retells the story of Snow White. It sees Sophie aka Snow White, being taken to the forest by classic controlled huntsman and getting saved by seven brothers.
It was an easy retelling to read and a nice tribute to the well know story, with some clear similarities to the original narrative. However it was still interesting with all the events that happen to Sophie, setting it apart from the classic story.
Having said this I did struggle to get into this book. Their were some very good bits, but some were just a bit hit and miss. Some aspects seemed a little to Disney to be realistic such as the spider or ladybug and out of place.
I may not have liked it that much, but I could see it appealing to lovers of fairytale retellings. 
Thank you you very much for the opportunity to read and review this book first.

Poisoned is a Snow White retelling.

Sophie is kind-hearted, full of empathy and a good person. Her whole life her step-mother has been telling her she's too kind-hearted, too weak to rule. On Sophie's eighteenth birthday the Queen commands the huntsman to kill Sophie and to remove her heart. The huntsman returns to the Queen with her heart, but little do they know Sophie lives on.

This has all the elements of the Snow White story, the apple, the dwarfs and it has so much more. It is fun and full of heart. It is about Sophie's journey discovering who she is and how she wants to lead her people. I particularly liked the journey with Will and how he taught her foraging and the woods.

Poisoned offers up a darker, insightful and timely take on a tale that we all think we know and love. 

Both here and with Stepsister, Donnelly allows the darkness of the original tales to take centre stage – holding nothing back in her tales. I love how both incorporate feminist themes and discussion at the heart of their stories, truly updating these tales for the 21st century. Particularly in Poisoned, Donnellly delves into subjects of manipulation, gaslighting and patriarchal control/expectations over women. Both the main female characters in Poisoned are trying to survive and claim their place in a world built to oppose them. She allows her characters complexity, growth and depth in a way that makes them all the more vivid and less like the cartoonish caricatures that we may expect. There’s no clear-cut dichotomy, as there are moments of empathy for each side. This is clearly one of Donnellys strengths, as she allows her characters to shine through. 

Indeed, the interaction between characters often brings some levity into the often dark and twisted world she’s weaved. The ragtag feel of the eventual found family of characters felt so tangible, with their chemistry often making me laugh. Some characters you will recognise, whereas others are new, again demonstrating that original stamp Donnelly is determined to make on the story. However, all of them are ones you will remember after the final page.

I really enjoyed the twists she threw in, as they kept reminding me that this isn’t the tale I know and therefore I should never expect to know precisely what is going to happen. Similarly, I was impressed by the sheer levels of creativity Donnelly employs throughout the book, fleshing out this colourful world full of magic and danger. I felt completely swept up and away into this new land, which is always a wonderful thing in 2020. 

Poisoned is a complex tale that pays homage to its grotesque origins, while also adding a unique touch that comments on the pressing issues of today. It brings old stories new life and therefore provokes new discussion, all with a heavy dose of Donnelly’s rich imagination.

I was really looking forward to this retelling of Snow White but i just didn't really connect with the story or the characters. I liked the moral of the story, how love conquers fear and that you should never give up.
Sophie is a great character especially for the younger readers to see themselves in for her bravery and courage and I liked Will, Arno and the 7 brothers but overall I felt that the story was a bit too childish for my liking.
I liked the ending how it was all brought together and finished off and the prologue was a bit of fun.
It is a quick and easy read for lovers of fairy tale retellings.

Sophie is Snow White, with hair black as coal and lips red as apples. You all know the story, but Donnelly has put a fantastic feminist twist on this retelling, focussing on the importance of kindness and the strength needed in a male-dominated world.

You know that saying: history is written by the winners? Well in this case, it has been written by the men. The wicked queen wasn’t all that wicked, she had to be extra strong to keep the throne in a world where men didn’t like women in charge; and she wasn’t vain, asking the mirror who was the fairest of them all, but rather asking how to keep herself in power; Snow White herself was kind but that didn’t make her passive or weak, it was how she persevered and cared for her kingdom.

I really enjoyed this; as a fan of the Brothers Grimm tales and of all fairy tale retellings, I greatly appreciated the new spin and the little hints to the original, like the three attempts of murder that the stepmother tried: the laces, the hair comb and finally the poisoned apple. While it almost felt slow-paced, Sophie traversed most of her kingdom and met a lot of people, some friendly and some foes, on her quest to topple the queen and get her heart back from the King of Crows. Speaking of whom, the personification of fear and pain was fascinating and very clever, especially mixed with the metaphor of cutting out Sophie’s heart – which would not only kill her but also remove her kindness and goodness. It was only the quick thinking of the “seven brothers” that saved Sophie’s soul and allowed her some extra time to make a plan and discover her own strength.

I do enjoy a retelling of a fairy tale, and Poisoned is an entertaining spin on Snow White. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the deadliest of all? 

Sophie is the young princess, castigated by her stepmother Adelaide for being too soft and unworthy of a future as a ruler. But when the huntsman takes her to the forest and removes her heart, what happens? Who are the little men who rescue her (love the household staff!) and is it Sophie's destiny to rule after all?

Princess Sophie will never make a strong Queen. She is too kind - too weak - and a source of frustration for her stepmother, who has had to show how ruthless she can be in order to be taken seriously in a world where kings rule. When Queen Adelaide realises that Sophie could be her own weakness, she orders her huntsman to cut out her heart. But when Sophie appears to survive this attack, she has a choice - to sit and await her own fate, or to take action and search for her heart and see for herself how 'weak' kindness truly is. 

I really wanted to enjoy this so much more. I love a good fairytale retelling, especially when it brings much more of the original, gruesome narrative back into it, when it adds snippets from local folklore, sets the tale back in its origins and makes it a feminist story all about discovering one's own worth.

And it feels like Poisoned technically delivered all of that, in a story with lots of rushing around and taking action, but the overall feel for me was a bit, 'meh'.

First off, I found Sophie hard to love. She was very much the naïve, kind-hearted kind of princess that would sing to the birds if this book had a musical number. Yes, she does grow a little as the story progresses - she learns that kind can be tough, that caring isn't weakness. But I'm not really sure what she gains from that, except for a stronger sense of self-worth. Her relationship with male characters is basically the plot of Frozen too, which didn't really add anything more valuable to her character, especially as all of her other male companions had to keep saving her after she had bumbled into some other problem as a result of her naivety. 

There were plenty of imaginative twists to the original tale - I initially really liked the inclusion of Fear stealing hearts, but found the way that this was hammered home became tedious after a while, especially when more random Four Horsemen characters arrived for no apparent reason.

And by that point there had been some extremely strong references - read: lifts - from Into the Woods.

I initially enjoyed the Darkwood setting - in the first half of the story it felt as though there was something there. But the characters spend so much time walking running and bumbling through the woods, backtracking and retracing steps that I began to find it a bit bizarre that these woods were so 'scary' when people are just wandering around in them all day long.

When we met the seven 'dwarves' it seemed as though they would become key players in the story, especially with their giant spider cook and large ladybird housekeeper?! Instead we have very little to do with them for the rest of the book, and they all appear to be made from the same mould.

I liked the inclusion of a wide range of creatures - kobolds and trolls and pixies - but yet again they're there in the background but not really present. And there are other creatures - makabers and waldichts - that, as far as I can tell, are just German translations of English words. I was excited to find new and weird Germanic folklore creatures, but instead I think they're just made up?

And once the main bad guy had been defeated in a melodramatic manner, then everything got a bit 'you are our Queen now, we will do anything you say!' - which is just ... selective feminism. It's feminism for Sophie, but not for anyone else. She might be kind-hearted and considerate now, and slowly become corrupted by power later on. Who can say? It's a bit of a lazy 'happily ever after'.

I was also hoping for more about the Queen. I've read some good retellings where the stepmother is rehabilitated in some way. In this, she seems to stay evil. I like the twist on 'mirror mirror on the wall' ('who will bring about my fall'), but aside from that, Adelaide was just presented as irredeemably evil, although with some good reasons for what she had become. Where is the sisterhood in that? With such a backstory, she would have been a prime protagonist.

Basically, it's a light fairytale retelling. It has some grit, some substance, plenty of action, is pretty accessible and a lot felt original. But it is probably more middle grade in its telling than YA, and in many ways feels like a story that skims that surface, rather than reaching anything meaningful or deep, and was very blatant in its message. I think I just expected more - in my opinion, a retelling like this just can't be all about the protagonist to truly class it as feminist. Otherwise it's just one-upmanship in through a different means.

2.5 stars rounded up to 3.

Poisoned is a dark, twisty but humorous take on Snow White. It's a new and exciting take on a classic tale,which makes it a very exciting read. The growth and personal journey the main protagonist goes in as she tries to deal with and escape her step mothers manipulations is so well crafted that it makes the book even more exciting.

What a brilliant retelling. I loved how the author stayed true to the character, but spun the story in an epic way

Snow white has always been my least favourite fairy tale, but only because the evil queen scares me! Especially when she turns into an old hag. Those images have haunted me since my childhood

I felt for Sophie the whole way thrwand loved the brothers as well. Introducing a newer, darker element into the story just completely changed it up.

A must read!

My thanks to Bonnier Books U.K. - Hot Key Books for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Poisoned’ by Jennifer Donnelly in exchange for an honest review. 

This is a skilful retelling of the story of Snow White. It opens with a powerful Prologue that had me hooked and eager to know more.

Princess Sophie is about to turn seventeen and inherit her father’s crown to become the queen of the Greenlands. Her stepmother, Adelaide, has been serving as Regent though has been constantly undermining Sophie’s confidence by telling her that she’s too soft and kind to rule effectively. 

With the urging of the King of Crows and her Magic Mirror, Adelaide sends Sophie off to the woods with her Huntsman, who has instructions to cut out the girl’s heart. Oh dear.... I shall leave things there to avoid spoilers. 

As with her last novel, ‘Stepsister’, I found ‘Poisoned’ an excellent retelling of this classic fairy tale. Sophie not only undertakes a difficult journey but is faced with the ongoing machinations of her wicked stepmother. Her outer journey is mirrored by one of self-discovery. 

I felt that Donnelly respected the source material while creatively weaving in new perspectives including having Adelaide be much more than a cartoon villainess and bringing in a variety of magical creatures and an interesting take on the seven dwarves.

It is a dark tale yet there were also moments of humour. I especially enjoyed the repartee between Sophie and Will, one of the companions that she meets on  her journey. Then there was Arno, a delightfully witty thief. Sophie was an easy character to care about, especially her determination to remain kind. 

Rich descriptions, a strong plot along with well developed characters ensured that I was totally engaged by ‘Poisoned’ from start to finish.

I plan to check out Jennifer Donnelly’s back catalogue while waiting eagerly for news of future projects.

I really enjoyed this book. It was an interesting twist on the snow white story. It was dark and i really liked how we see a different side to the step mother who we all believe to be shallow and vain. I really liked seeing that. I did like the MC but i did find her a little annoying too. But i liked how she progressed and grew throughout the story.

Snow white has never been one of my favourite fairy tales but I loved this dark twisty take on it. Sophie is constantly told that she is too soft and kind to be queen and is made to feel that love is a weakness. We know how the story goes she's taken to the forest to have her heart cut out by the huntsman but that is not where the story ends. Everything Sophie ensures helps shape her with a little help along the way. I really liked the characters in this book although Arno was my favourite. His wit and humour gave me a chuckle. Yes the story was a tad predictable in places but it's based on a well known fairy tale so it's going to be yet it was never boring. It kept me gripped and was a thoroughly enjoyable read. I will definitely be looking forward to more of these dark fairytale take on's

The prologue was thrilling and really captured me, I couldn't wait to read more. Who is this mystery villain the huntsman is describing? As much as the Stepmother seems evil, I could almost understand why she had to become the hard woman she is. She knew she wouldn’t have survived in her world otherwise. As to her relationship with Sophie, she actually seems to believe it is necessary to toughen her up in order for her to cope when she becomes queen.

 

I really enjoyed Stepsister so I was very excited to find that Jennifer Donnelly had written a second retelling. However, as much as I wanted to love this book, I just didn’t enjoy the story as much as the first. Some parts, particularly the romance, were fairly predictable and it started to get a little ridiculous how many times the princess could be tricked and killed! I did really enjoy the occasional points of view of the Queen and other characters which gave intriguing insights into these others’ motivations. The moral of the story comes across a little saccharine, but ultimately it is uplifting.

I love all of JD's books and this one is no exception... I hope she keeps with the disney retelleing themes for a while <3

The beautiful cover drew me to this book and also the synopsis which describes a dark retelling of Snow White and I couldn’t wait to get stuck in. Poisoned stays true to the original story for the most part, with the addition of one or two clever and innovative twists by the author.  Sophie’s clockwork heart, which has a limited time to beat, clicking and whirring in odd ways, added some tension and urgency to the storyline.  The plot is engaging and action-packed and there are a plethora of creatures and other dangers encountered to keep the reader entertained.  For a young adult fantasy there are some elements which felt distinctly middle grade; at one point an apron wearing ladybug appeared and there is a spider called Webber who cooked the food.  This seemed a bit at odds with the rest of the story, and a complete contrast to the other creatures in the book, however I’m sure the author had her reasons for writing these characters in.

The world is vividly described and the characters are well rounded and explored in just about enough detail to get a feel of their personalities and background history.  Even though most of these characters are familiar to us from the original story, the author made them feel fresh and new.  Sophie is slightly lacking as a female lead, I prefer to see a gutsy and feisty individual whereas she came across as naïve and a bit too ‘nice’.  She does turn it around when she decides her handsome prince is not going to rescue her and goes on a journey to take charge of her own destiny.  

Overall, an easy and compelling read and the short chapters make it go by quickly.  This is a lightweight fantasy, with some lovely writing and some wonderful little twists to the original tale.  Whilst is has bite, it wasn’t quite the dark and twisty tale I was expecting and I felt the author could have pushed the boundaries a little further.  Fans of retellings and young adult fantasy will love this tale.