six gun snow white by catherynne m valente

But when this hardback beauty arrived in the mail, there was no way I wasn’t going to devour it, and soon. I am still right in the middle of The Orphan’s Tales and my head (and heart) has a lot of trouble letting go of that world. I’ll be honest, this time around the style took a little getting used to. Filled with fascinating glimpses through the fabled looking glass and a close-up look at hard living in the gritty gun-slinging West, readers will be enchanted by this story at once familiar and entirely new. 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. This girl has been born into a world with no place for a half-native, half-white child. With her mother’s death in childbirth, so begins a heroine’s tale equal parts heartbreak and strength. In the novella Six-Gun Snow White, Valente transports the title’s heroine to a masterfully evoked Old West where Coyote is just as likely to be found as the seven dwarves.Ī plain-spoken, appealing narrator relates the history of her 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. Valente comes a brilliant reinvention of one the best known fairy tales of all time. H married a Crow woman and had a baby with her round about the time he struck his fortune in the good blue, which is how folk used to designate Nevada silver.įrom New York Times bestselling author Catherynne M. Valene is easily my favorite writer.įirst sentence: I accept with equanimity that you will not credit me when I tell you Mr. If I haven’t said it before, I’ll say it here: Catherynne M. And the amazing, surprising, even unbelievable thing is that every single one of them is brilliant. I just can’t keep my hands (and eyes) off her books. Cat Valente has been rocking my reading world since last year but 2013 is particularly Valente-heavy.

To my attentive readers, this will come as no surprise at all. But here is another book that deserves all kinds of superlatives and that I can’t shut up about.

Six gun snow white by catherynne m valente