Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

I came back to this Joan Aiken novelization of the 1937 Disney film expecting work-for-hire filler and was quietly surprised by how seriously Aiken took the project. The plot is, of course, the film. The pleasure is in the texture Aiken adds: the forest the dwarfs walk home through, the small superstitions of the queen's court, the bird-chatter Snow White carries on the road.

Aiken's prose is doing more work than the form required. There are passages where you can feel her writing a different book inside this one, the way Lewis Carroll occasionally hijacked his own translations.

Three stars. Best for Aiken completists and for readers interested in serious work-for-hire as a form. Not essential, but more interesting than the cover would suggest.