This is well-written and incredibly clever, and it has all the makings of a book I would love: slow-moving and character-driven, historical fiction (albeit an alternative-history in which magic exists), fairy tales, sisters. Yet, I struggled the entire time to connect with this book (to the point that I almost quit about halfway through). It did pick up some in the second half, but this just didn’t do it for me. Even though I wanted to know how it ended, I really just did not care about these characters.