This isn't exactly a fairy tale, although the mutated bones of one are clear in the narrative gaps. It's a fantastical and fantastic young adult novel that quietly and calmly thinks about young love and the curses of being a woman - one who looks beautiful, one who does not, one who wishes she was. The story is brutal, in its own way, but also shiningly kind in the possibilities that it offers beyond the question of who is fairest and what that does.