Snow White and Rose Red
A Modern Fairy Tale
by Regina Doman
Bethlehem Books * Ignatius Press
280 pp.
800/757-6831

Fairy tales possess something of the mysterious simplicity and won der of childhood; they also exert a strong, primeval appeal be cause they deal with the fundamentals of life: good and evil, love and death.

Snow White and Rose Red draws much of its charm from the fairy tale which inspired its creation. Re gina Doman has taken a Brothers Grimm fairy tale “Snow White and Rose Red” (not the better known Snow White story), and using its plot as a skeleton outline, has written an adventurous mystery for adolescents. She has a good tale to tell and she tells it well.

Blanche (Snow White) and her younger sister Rose (Rose Red) live in New York City with their mother, Jean Brier, who works as a nurse in an Emergency Room. After years of living in the country, they recently moved to the city because of the father’s death. The sisters are having a difficult time adjusting to the city and to their new high school, St. Cather ine’s.

Blanch, nervous and timid, differs from the impetuous and gul lible Rose. But they share a deep love for each other, their mother, and the Catholic way of life. The story begins when Bear, a young man of the streets with a surprising love of poetry, enters the lives of the Brier family, drawing the sisters into mystery and danger.

The harshness of contemporary life intrudes in the story: drug dealers at the high school and Roses’s passing encounter with a prostitute on the streets. Regina Doman captures all too well the cruelty to which adolescents (and not only they) can inflict on one of their peers. Blanche constantly receives taunts from a clique of her classmates including a blasphemous nickname.

Blanche and Rose live in a world of poetry, good books, classical music, and thoughtful conversation in contrast to the domain of many American teenagers: licen tious television shows, ob noxious music videos, trite teenage magazines, and sterile gossip.

This work appeals to the moral imagination of the young, a strong but oft times latent faculty, revealing the beauty of virtue in its heros and heroines—their faith, courage, integrity, chastity, and loyalty. Life is no dull pursuit of self nor a meaningless exercise but rather a spiritual drama or, shall we say, a fairy tale. Rose explains this Ches tertonian outlook on life:

“As though there’s a story going on that everyone is a part of, but not everybody knows about? Maybe ‘story’ isn’t the right word—a sort of drama, a battle between what’s peripheral and what’s really important. As though the people you meet aren’t just their plain, prosaic selves, but are actually princes and princesses, gods and goddesses, fairies, shepherds, all sort of fantastic creatures who’ve chosen to hide their real shape for some reason or another. Have you ever thought that?”

Regina Domain has uncovered for the reader the grand spiritual adventure of life. She has written a good read, for not only does Snow White & Rose Red read well but it is imbued with the goodness and romance of an authentic Catholic vision of life. A vision our youth desperately need to behold.

John O’Connell is the Editor of The Catholic Faith magazine.