Six-Gun Snow White

I read this when my son was born, looking for a familiar story in more ways than one. This imported classic European fairy tale has our gunslinging Snow White escaping to the wild west and feels like a new comfort fable… if replacing dark twisted forests for a wind-whipped big sky can be comforting. It’s a story that doesn’t know how to end, or even if it should end—making it another facet to join numerous retellings. The Huntsman becomes a Pinkerton, the dwarves now a band of women on the run, and the Prince a melancholy expression of… show more.

Not every fairytale ends with the Prince swooping in to save the troubled maiden. Six-Gun Snow White is no damsel in distress. Valente took a traditional children’s story and turned it into a very dark Western Tale. The biracial heroine, who neither belongs in the white world of her father nor in the Native American world of her mother, struggles to keep one step ahead of the wicked witch stepmother. The flowery unique tone of the writing still gives the novel a hint of the children’s tale it was based on, and might not be for everyone. To me, Snow… show more.

Valente’s novella stages “Snow White” in the Wild West against an evocative backdrop of settler colonialism, the sexual commodification of women, the specter of Indian orphanages, and feminist/feminine enclaves. Here, where the European fairy-tale tradition meets Indigenous folklore and mythology, Six-Gun Snow White challenges the dominant, implicitly racialized understandings of beauty and femininity at the heart of “Snow White.”