Description: At sixteen, Mina's mother is dead, her magician father is vicious, and her silent heart has never beat with love for anyone—has never beat at all, in fact, but she’d always thought that fact normal. She never guessed that her father cut out her heart and replaced it with one of glass. When she moves to Whitespring Castle and sees its king for the first time, Mina forms a plan: win the king’s heart with her beauty, become queen, and finally know love. The only catch is that she’ll have to become a stepmother.
   Fifteen-year-old Lynet looks just like her late mother, and one day she discovers why: a magician created her out of snow in the dead queen’s image, at her father’s order. But despite being the dead queen made flesh, Lynet would rather be like her fierce and regal stepmother, Mina. She gets her wish when her father makes Lynet queen of the southern territories, displacing Mina. Now Mina is starting to look at Lynet with something like hatred, and Lynet must decide what to do—and who to be—to win back the only mother she’s ever known…or else defeat her once and for all.

Review: Girls Made of Snow and Glass is a feminist fairy tale that borrows elements of Snow White and the Snow Queen stories to create a genuinely new tale that celebrates women claiming their own strengths and helping each other instead of tearing them apart. The story is told from two points of views into two alternating timelines that ultimately converge at the book's climax. 
  In the present story line, Lynet has grown up in the shadow of her mother, Emilia, who died during child birth. She is an exact physical replica of her mother and has been sheltered by her over protective father. Lynet is burdened by her father's expectations that she emulate the mother she's never known and become the rightful Queen of the Southern Territories; instead, she idolizes her stepmother, Mina, who's always treated Lynet with tenderness and has no aspirations to be queen at all.
  In the past story line, we follow Mina as a girl who is desperate to find love and affection from her domineering and wicked father Gregory, only to be told that she is incapable to love and have anyone love her. She welds her beauty as power and makes her way to the court of the Southern Territories. When the king dies, only one can claim the throne and the other must die.
  Through Lynet's and Mina's perspectives, we see how these two women share many similarities though their motives maybe entirely different. Lynet and Mina are three dimensional, flawed characters. Lynet is passive and has accepted her fate of following her father's life plan for her until she stops to asks herself of what she wants. It takes her a long time to identify her strengths and to view the throne as something else besides a ball and a chain. Unlike Lynet, Mina already knows her strengths but she has to learn self-love and acceptance. There were many times Mina that teetered off the cliff of being a villain that we all recognize as the evil queen, but her self awareness and conscious has always saved her. What I found exceptional and refreshing is that both women genuinely care and admire each other.
 The pacing of the story is slow burning that matches well with the character development and might deter some readers, but the characters are so worth it. Their epiphanies take time to occur as the characters stumble many times until they reach the satisfying and revolutionary conclusion. Magic is used in the right amounts in the story and their were times that I wished it was explained a bit more clearly. There is some romance subplots for each women, but the main focus of the story is the relationship between Lynet and Mina. Girls Made of Snow and Glass is a character driven fairy tale that refuses to use common tropes and is filled with magic, adventure, and self discovery. 

 Rating: 4 stars

Words of Caution:

If you like this book try: Hunted by Megan Spooner, The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden