Six-Gun Snow White
Description:
A New York Times bestselling author offers a brilliant reinvention of one of the best-known fairy tales of all time with Snow White as a gunslinger in the mythical Wild West.
Forget the dark, enchanted forest. Picture instead a masterfully evoked Old West where you are more likely to find coyotes as the seven dwarves. Insert into this scene a plain-spoken, appealing narrator who relates the history of our heroine’s parents—a Nevada silver baron who forced the Crow people to give up one of their most beautiful daughters, Gun That Sings, in marriage to him. Although her mother’s life ended as hers began, so begins a remarkable tale: equal parts heartbreak and strength. This girl has been born into a world with no place for a half-native, half-white child. After being hidden for years, a very wicked stepmother finally gifts her with the name Snow White, referring to the pale skin she will never have. Filled with fascinating glimpses through the fabled looking glass and a close-up look at hard living in the gritty gun-slinging West, this is an utterly enchanting story…at once familiar and entirely new.
My Review:
Bloody brilliant!
This gun slinging girl is no Snow White….unless red juicy apples are blood pumping hearts and the 7 dwarves are 7 coyotes!
The girl was born with hair black as coal, lips red as blood and skin reflecting that of her mothers. She is the daughter of ‘Gun That Sings’, the Crow Indian Bride her father took from Montana Territory to California.
Living a sheltered live in a zoo that daddy built, she never is allowed to leave the grounds and has a gun she calls Rose Red. Since her mother died at birth, her father remarries a woman from Boston. This new stepmother does not like this girl and calls the “half-breed” Snow White. But despite the stepmother’s greatest efforts, she cannot clean or whiten the girl anymore! Her displeasure for the girl means she abuses her power and treats the girl badly with chores and beatings.
But Snow-White escapes to the Wild West to get away from her stepmother. Along the way she’ll discover what the real world is like and ends up surrounded with all kinds of characters.
***
I really liked this little novella. It had the most brilliant and brash lines with the most expressive vocabulary of its kind that I have read. It was knee slapping at moments as well as heartbreaking when Snow-White makes analogies about race, dominations of power and abuse. The interwoven fairy tale in the Wild West setting where a brilliant idea I thought and made this one unique read I highly recommend.