Hi! Thanks so much for the ask! This is a totally valid concern, and I’m honestly quite glad you’ve brought it up. I’m going to try to answer without spoilers, but I promise that this is something I’ve thought about!
A big theme in my story is allowing my protagonists to escape their very restrictive upbringings and be exposed more to the much bigger world around them. Another is that nothing is really what it seems to be. At first, both of them make judgments based on their limited experience of the world, and because the book is written in multiple first-person, it’s possible that the reader will see one or both of their sides. However, as the plot pushes them further, expectations and assumptions are challenged. While I’ll be extra sure to make it clear that the antagonistic “dwarf” characters are not representative of their entire kind, Pomona and Nevea don’t meet a wide variety of this group of people in the first book (I’ll make an important note that they are never referred to as “dwarves” or “dwarfs” in the book–they’re called Nova–but for the sake of the description and the need to make it clear that it’s a Snow White retelling, I use that word in the blurb). Without giving away spoilers, this may change in subsequent books in the series, because they’ll be forced to meet and ally with a great number of different kinds of people.
As I was developing this series, I definitely realized that any black-and-white depiction of any group of people as good or evil would cause trouble and potentially do harm. My characters have their own biases, but these will be challenged as the story goes on, because uncritical bias does not a good story make. Thanks so much for your question!
Sarah Viehmann 