Though the ending rushes in unexpectedly, this is an engaging and delightfully written tale.
Valente (The Boy Who Lost Fairyland, 2015, etc.) reimagines “Snow White” as a story set in an extravagantly imagined Wild West and propelled by a sharpshooting, half-Crow heroine.
Valente’s Snow White is the daughter of Mr. H, a greedy man who made his fortune on Nevada silver mines and married a woman of the Crow people named Gun That Sings as a way to possess her beauty completely. When Gun That Sings dies in childbirth, her daughter is left to a lonely childhood cloistered in luxury and often neglected by a father embarrassed by the reality of her half-Crow, half-white heritage. Mr. H remarries, and his new wife, a cruel woman with mysterious and unpleasant powers, gives her stepdaughter the name “Snow White” as an insult against her darker skin. Snow White endures outrageous and inventive abuse of mind and body until she grows up and finds herself a young woman with the grit and fierceness necessary to run away and discover her own life. Valente tells Snow White’s story with an enjoyably distinctive voice, one that nods to the vernacular of both the fictional Old West and fairy tales, and manages to be equally vivid when coming straight through Snow White as she narrates her childhood and through the voice of a narrator describing her adventures when the novella pivots partway through. Her Wild West is crammed with fascinating details (a gemstone mine with an underground saloon; a town run by extraordinary women outlaws) and disturbing magic (a mirror whose reflections have their own enchanted life; a boy who's part deer), all offered with a sharp eye for how the strange reflects the most ordinary, most interesting parts of being human.
Though the ending rushes in unexpectedly, this is an engaging and delightfully written tale.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4814-4472-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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