I've never used "absolutely disgusted" in a review title before today, but I did precisely that today at my blog, American Indians in Children's Literature. I am absolutely disgusted with SIX GUN SNOW WHITE. There are vile things in the world. Some of them are subtly vile, which makes them dangerous because you aren't aware of what is going into your head and heart.Some things, like Catherynne M. Valente's Six-Gun Snow White are gratuitously vile. As a Native woman, it is very hard to read Valen...

So soNice spin on the story but overall it felt cold and distant. The atmosphere was there but it felt like we were being kept at arm's length the whole time. The switch from Snow White's perspective wasn't all bad but felt awkward at times.I did get a kick out of the hints to the original though. The ending felt like (to me) the author just wanted to wrap up the story. Nice attempt but overall lackluster. *shrugs* 2.5 stars

Reviewed by: Rabid Reads4.5 starsWhen you’re a booklover, you read all kinds of books for all kinds of reasons. Sure, you have your favorite authors and series, but what about the lesser known quantities? Could be the hype, could be a recommendation, but whatever it is, you go into the reading of it with hope. Hope that it will make you feel something. Hope that you’ll love it. Hope that it will teach you something about yourself. Hope that it will teach you something about the world. Hope that

[7/10]I have noticed recently the popularity of spoof novels, mashing together Jane Austen and zombies or Abraham Lincoln with vampires. I am not much tempted to give them a try, having low expectations from the lack of originality and from the low-brow/cheap type of humor. The reason I mentioned them is that I want to stress that Catherynne Valente doesn't belong in this category. She has found a niche as anauthor from re-examining classic fairytales and myths from a modern and usually revision...

Valente’s writing can be pretty “out there,” to my mind. The Orphan’s Tales duology is great and Deathless also very good, but I wasn’t able to get past the sample of Radiance. Six-Gun Snow White is deceptively grounded: it’s a retelling of a familiar fairytale, and it’s set in the 19th century American West. Valente shows her extraordinary versatility by writing the book in the language of a western: from other work I know she is capable of lyrical writing heavy on figurative language, but this...

Catherynne M. Valente must be one of the most imaginative and talented writers in speculative fiction in the last ever so many years.Six Gun Snow White, her 2013 novella (160 pages) re-tells the old German folk tale made famous by the Brothers Grimm and Walt Disney, but in a similar way that Stephen King did with The Gunslinger, by casting a fantasy story into a western. Unlike King’s surreal fantasy with western themes and settings, though, Valente has this Snow White, as a Native American daug...

I think this is an excellent novel with or without its being a retelling of Snow White.Unfortunately, I'm not and never have been a huge fan of Westerns. That being said, I was only able to get into it as far as Cat Valente could carry it, which was quite far, indeed. The best things I can say about it is that this was never tongue-in-cheek or a lackadaisical mapping of the fairytale into recognizable parody. It felt like a serious and heartfelt rendition of magical realism, where we are never q...

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 mothe...

To be honest I didn't really go into this with any specific expectation as the only other book by Catherynne Valente I had read was The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland and that was a truly beautiful but also a very bizarre story. Of course, I did expect at least some parallels to Snow White, but this is quite a lot more than that becuase it's also a weird western take on the whole affair, and again it's beautifully written.We follow the main character as she narrates her story of her early li...

"I gradually understood the truth of my situation: I was a secret." pg 14, ebook.Catherynne Valente has penned a bewildering and ultimately disappointing western-tinged fairy tale retelling in Six-Gun Snow White. Her reimagining of the classic story has Snow White as an unloved daughter of a mine speculator and an abused, indigenous mother. When her mother ends her own life, Snow White's father marries a mysterious woman from back East, the evil stepmother of fairytale infamy, whom the narrator

Take fairy tale mythology, the sideways structure of Native American folklore, a Wild West setting, weave it through with themes on race and gender and wrap it in Valente's wordsmithing, and you'll have Six-Gun Snow White."A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know. Its blood, which is its history. My body is my truth, and I have laid it out as evidence on the table of my father's reputation, for by know you may have guessed my next revelation." --from The Creation of Snow WhiteThis bea...

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/ “Magic is just a word for what’s left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.” First things first . . . . Are you fucking kidding me right now, Goodreads???? Go home, recommendation feature. You. Are. Drunk.If you couldn’t tell by the title, this is a retelling of the classic. Some changes include Snow White not being quite the damsel in distress the original made her out to be, but instead . . . . The seve...

About all I knew about Snow White is the Disney version, with the Seven Dwarves. And Prince Charming. None of that here. But the Wicked Stepmother is, in spades!Lots of interesting stuff, and I got more caught up in the story as I got further into it, and sussed out some of the backstory details she’s using. Mr. H, the mining magnate, was modeled (I'm almost certain) on George Hearst, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_.... The Blue is the sticky blue clay, that clung to the early gold miners’...

You’re in a story and the body writing it is an asshole. There are stories and there are characters. Then, you also have stories with characters and characters with stories.But what Valente does is entirely different. She creates her characters, and they move on, swirl around, slowly and surely coalescing into a story, pushing it forward even as they become the story.Six-Gun Snow White is a retelling and it stays very true to the original fairytale, but it is much more honest and original tha

Just wonderful.Valente has a powerful voice and a gift for visceral descriptions, which breathe a vibrancy to the stories and the uncanny ability to take myth and fable and turn them into modern tales. Allegories of womanhood and what it means to be female. The themes are universal and in many ways cautionary tales. I loved this version of Snow White in the Old West. I was captivated by the concept when I spotted it, but it was even better than I tried to imagine. Valente took the story and turn...

When a half-breed girl saddled with the nickname Snow White has had enough of her wicked stepmother, she goes on the run in the Wild West. As she lives by her gun and her wits, will past catch up with her?Six-Gun Snow White is a retelling of Snow White as a western. It hearkens to earlier, non-sanitized, pre-Disney versions of the tale. Mr. H, Snow White's father, buys her mother, Gun Who Sings, from her tribe. Gun Who Sings dies in childbirth and things are as good as could be expected until th...

Rating: 4.9* of fiveThis glittering reimagination of a foundational myth wins an almost-perfect score from me. Go take a gander. Valente is a reliable source of wonderful and creative takes and re-takes on fairy tales, but she's also a wordsmith of astounding facility.

Catherynne Valente is such a master prose smith that anything she writes is worth reading, but I run hot and cold on the stories she actually tells. Sometimes her stories just seem to get lost in the craft of telling them.Six-Gun Snow White holds together admirably as a Western retelling of Snow White, with Snow being the half-breed daughter of a rich silver baron and a Crow woman.Pampered and spoiled and kept hidden away in an upper floor out of sight by Daddy, Snow lives a lonely but untrouble...

By all accounts (in my mind), this book should have irritated the hell out of me.I'm not sure why it didn't.I know that the writing is gimmicky. I understand that it's trying to be all hep with the westernizing of a fairy tale because retelling fairy tales is all the rage but retelling them as they mostly haven't been retold is even better and I can totally see the "I'm trying to be cool" in this effort. But for some reason, it just all worked for me and I really enjoyed this book.In this retell...

Words. Wordswordswords. Cat Valente is one of those authors that uses lots of words, many of them pretty. But (for me) it's fucking difficult to extract the story from all them thar pretty words. Are you in there, story? I feel like you must be! Everyone raves about your "gorgeous/lush/elegant/poetic" prose, but what good are all these beautiful sentences if I can't parse their meaning?Calm down, sentences, you're giving me a headache. Cat Valente writes books that I want to love. I read what ot...