Six-Gun Snow White

Easily one of the most entertaining fairy tale retellings I've read, with immersive, evocative prose that emphatically drives home the atmosphere it sets out to generate.

When Mr. H, a local white mining tycoon falls in love with Gun That Sings, one of the Crow Nation, he never foresaw that not only would she soon be dead from childbirth but that he would be left with their baby daughter to care for. Leaving her to the care of various nannies and other hired help, he sets out to continue amassing his fortune, eventually remarrying a not-so-respectable white woman from a wealthy family herself. But the new Mrs. H has no love lost for the step daughter she didn't know she was going to have, and soon Snow White decides she's had enough. Stealing her father's hat, a horse, and with Rose Red locked and loaded on her hip, she sets out to cut herself a way to the Crow Nation, and her mother's people.

I've had a bad track record with retellings in general. At best, I'm ambivalent, at worst I just plain don't enjoy them. As such, Cat Valente joins Neil Gaiman in being the only two authors who've retold a fairy tale and managed to completely sweep me away along with it. Six-Gun Snow White was a surprisingly fun, absorbing take on the tale of Snow White, with a healthy dose of Western and pagan magic added into the mix.

Definitely my favorite part of the entire story was the Western element. Not only is the story set roughly towards the end of the mining boom that led to the formation of the Wild West, but Valente wonderfully adds to the feeling of the story with cowboy slang and a Western style of narration that just works wonders. At times I felt like I could have been sitting around a campfire listening to some old fart tell us this true story based on real events while a pot of squirrel stew simmered over the fire or something. It fits well with the Western remix of the Snow White tale she sets out to create, and exponentially increased my general enjoyment of the entire tale as a whole.

Snow White herself makes an interesting character. As a half Indian and half white woman, she finds herself considered a savage, little better than a familiar monstrosity or an animal by the white folks she meets, and as a white woman by the Indians she comes across. A woman belonging to both worlds and neither. Combined with a childhood where she's first largely ignored by her father, and then tormented by her stepmother, I really found myself hooked when she decided she'd had enough, strapped her iron on and set out on her own. Simply put, she's an awesome main character who only gets cooler as the chapters go by.

But as fun a romp as it all was, there were parts that just didn't work for me. The first is actually Valente's insistence on repeatedly driving home the point of how sexist it was against women back in that time period. It's a natural part of the setting, so at first I had no issue with her highlighting it, but after a few more repeats within a fifty page span of story at the start, I got fed up of it. I'm generally uninterested in social commentary where it comes to what I read, and it turns out Kameron Hurley's The Mirror Empire and Michael J. Sullivan's Hollow World, both of which I've read quite recently, severely drained the interest I had in authors using their tale to take a stance on certain issues. So as a result Six-Gun Snow White ended up paying for that.

The second issue I had with it was the ending. Like I mentioned before, my favorite part of the tale was the heavy Western element she incorporates into her retelling. I grew up watching a lot of Western movies, my mother's a fan, so when the occasional Western fantasy like this rolls across my radar I can't help myself getting it. And though I appreciate how seamlessly she combines her interestingly unique ending with the tale she'd presented up to that point, for me it broke the magic, the vibe the entire story had up to that point, and ended up reducing my enjoyment of it all as a whole. It felt a bit like she was sacrificing what was, to me, one of the strongest elements of the book, in exchange for a plot twist ending.

So all in all, definitely a novella to pick up if you like creative fairy tale retellings, Western fantasies, cool main characters, or social commentary on sexism, and definitely a must read if you like the sound of all of those. Catherynne Valente not only manages to put an interesting spin on the Snow White legend, but also marvellously captures the essence of what it's all about.