Snow by Tracy Lynn

Snow is the version of "Snow White" for the "Once Upon A Time" line of YA fairy tale adaptations. (Though not all the tales adapted are typically considered fairy tales.) It's probably the best of the ones I've read so far.

Set in 19th Century Wales (and later London) Jessica is the daughter of an uncaring, neglectful Duke who eventually marries Anne, a beautiful woman obsessed with her looks, and with having child. Anne is also a sorceress and enchants her minstrel, Alan, who is also Jessica's friend, to observe her and never lie to her ,and to never tell anyone about her experiments. Eventually, of course, Anne decides to use Jessica's heart in her experiments, and Jessica runs away to London.

There's no prince in sight, unless you count a Count with grabby hands who gets soundly thrashed by Jessica, and the dwarves are a gang of half-human/half-animal thieves who Jessica meets in London, and the story takes a decidedly steampunk bent in the second half, but that works well for it. Plotwise, it seems to draw some inspiration from Snow White: A Tale of Terror, which is fine by me as I'm very fond of that movie. One thing I particularly liked was the take on Snow White's father. Normally, if versions remember to include him, he has and almost Deerskin-like fixation on his daughter who he's always comparing to her mother, and treats his second wife as an afterthought when he isn't droning on about how his daughter is so beautiful and so like her mother (years of that and you start to understand the stepmother a bit) so I liked that he was a bad father and a pretty much as bad father and got called on it. (Also, this line has a bit of a habit of villifying mothers-including when the original story doesn't-and portraying father's as wonderful and saintly-including when they are kind of why it all goes wrong in the original story-that the change was rather a relief.)

Fun book, interesting take on the legend, and longer than other books in the line, though still fairly short. "Tracy Lynn" is apparently the pseudonym for the author of the Nine Lives of Chloe King books, so I might check those out even though I didn't last through 15 minutes of the TV show.