Title: Stitching Snow
Author: R.C. Lewis
Rating: 3.8/5
Retelling of: Snow White
The Twist: Snow White set in an interplanetary space setting between four planets, where the dwarfs are robot drones and Snow gets a lot more done than sleep in a glass coffin.
I bought this book a while back but it’s been sitting on my shelf, unread, for ages. Despite being a huge Star Wars fan and thoroughly enjoying sci-fi, I’m often not all that drawn to “space books” or space adventures. I’d much rather read a fantasy first. So my space-y books tend to get left behind for a while.
Stitching Snow reminded me that I still do like reading fantastical space adventures, especially where they meet fairy tales. It’s just a fun time when a story you know fairly well gets recast in a new light that includes interplanetary travel and advanced technology while also juggling some good old-fashioned court politics and overthrowing a corrupt monarchy. A corrupt space monarchy.
Before I go any further, though, I will say that the book does contain some darker themes (content warning) of sexual abuse, physical abuse, violence, and some manipulation. Though R.C. Lewis makes an effort to keep her book clean (no swearing, no graphic depictions of either violence or sexual encounters, either consensual or non-consensual), there are heavy hints and near misses that could be triggering to some. These encounters or traumas will also be addressed in this review.
The General Overview
Stitching Snow opens up with Essie (our Snow White) fighting in a cage match, so right off the bat you know this isn’t going to be your typical, sweet, singing-to-the-birds type of Snow White. Essie has been living in hiding within a mining colony on Thanda, a freezing cold planet that is rich in merinium, a source of fuel and energy used and coveted by the three other planets in the solar system where the story is set. She spends most of her days “stitching” together codes and light mechanical repairs, specifically for the seven drones she has built to aid the mining colony in their attempts to mine the dangerous material. When she needs a bit of extra cash, she fights in cage matches.
But this unsteady life of fighting, surviving, and coding is soon interrupted by the untimely crash of a mysterious shuttle. Essie rescues the only person inside, a young man named Dane who claims to be from Garam, seeking a lost treasure in another province on Thanda. Essie agrees to help repair his ship, but once those repairs are done, Dane realizes just who she is–the missing crown princess of Windsong, Princess Snow–and kidnaps her from Thanda in order to trade her back to her father for his own gains.
But even Dane isn’t who he seems to be. As they travel together, getting into more than a few misadventures that land them on Garam, a technologically advanced but suppressed planet colony, and later Candara, home to the “Exiles,” the mind-controlling enemies of Windsong who have been blamed for Essie’s disappearance, they realize the stories and truths that each of them hold are just fractured pieces of the bigger picture. When they finally get around to working together, they realize the political machinations are more complicated and dangerous than either of them originally believed. However, despite it all, Essie is reluctant to return home, either as a prisoner or a revolutionary. After all, her stepmother, Queen Olivia, still wants her as dead now as she did eight years ago. But eventually she must come to terms with the fact that she may be the only person in the solar system with the unique ability to put an end to the tyranny and war her father and stepmother have been perpetuating.
Altogether I thought the story was pretty good. Though there were a few cliche moments here and there, and some of the plot elements got confusing or weren’t as fleshed out as they could have been (as you’ll see in my critiques), overall this was a fun space adventure and generally light-hearted story. Both Essie and Dane felt like complex and motivated characters, each struggling with their own personal wars, and the main focus on the search for truth, politically and personally, was well written. More so than the political and militaristic maneuvering, but we’ll get to that.
The Original Story Factor
This book did a lot of interesting things with the original story. It largely departed from the original, beginning where the tale’s midway point would be, when Snow White is already living with the dwarfs. While Essie is still living in a mining colony surrounded entirely by men (the women and children in Thanda live in an area called the Bands, but Essie lives near the mines), the seven dwarf figures weren’t there when she arrived. She built them one by one to work in the mines with the miners.
Each dwarf “drone” has a distinct personality, but thankfully they don’t seem to be modeled heavily after the Disney dwarfs, which is a pretty common tactic Snow White retellings these days like to do. There’s still a grumpy dwarf named Cusser, and a dopey dwarf named Dimwit, but otherwise the other dwarfs seem refreshingly new.
The huntsman makes an appearance as an ally, and Dane nicely fleshes out the otherwise boring and somewhat creepy role of the traditional Snow White prince. I thought it was interesting that Dane, for the first part of the story, considered Essie little more than tradable property–much like the original prince, who sees the “dead” Snow White in her glass casket and wants to take her home. In that state, Snow White really isn’t anything but property. Whether that connection of “prince treats Snow like an object” was intentional by Lewis or not, I thought it was interesting. It’s made better by the fact that Dane eventually stops being a weirdly driven kidnapper who likes to think he can trade people for his own gains, and instead becomes a staunch ally. The original prince doesn’t exactly get the same turnaround, really.
There’s no glass casket in this story, but there is a kiss. My favorite tie-in from the original story, however, was the inclusion of the red-hot shoes. You see, in some versions of the original story, after Snow White is revived and is marrying the prince, she invites her stepmother to the wedding or a later celebration. There she, or someone else in charge, makes the stepmother dance herself to death in red-hot shoes.
I won’t reveal how Stitching Snow incorporated that little detail, but I will say I was highly satisfied with how it all went down.
The Criticism
Stitching Snow is a book that has not, shall we say, aged well. It was published in 2014, so it’s been six years, but even so, a lot of the more progressive details felt stale. For example the “strong female character” trope was pretty heavy-handed in the book, considering that Essie was literally a cage fighter on Thanda, but this eased off a bit as the story went on. Lewis handled details and reactions around Essie’s sexual assault history with a fair amount of delicacy and grace, but some portions came off a little heavy-handed with their cautionary approaches while others I felt weren’t delicate enough.
Meanwhile, my impressions of the space setting were definitely tainted by the fact that I had read Cinder prior to this and absolutely loved Cinder. There are too many elements that are similar here for me to not think that Cinder was a heavy influence. For one, both Essie and Cinder are mechanics in some way, although Essie operates more at a software level than a mechanical one and doesn’t have the benefit of Cinder’s cybernetic enhancements. Two, both stories involve a kind of “mind control” race. In Cinder, it’s the Lunars, who can manipulate bioelectrical patterns in the brain to force people to act certain ways, feel certain things, or see certain images. In Stitching Snow, the Candarans have the ability to “transition” or “body-hop” into the mind of someone nearby, but they can’t control them fully. They can read their thoughts, and sometimes manipulate or “tip” them into making certain decisions over others, but it’s not nearly as powerful as Lunar control. I did, however, think it was curious that both were in Stitching Snow and wondered how heavily Cinder influenced the details of this story world.
This next critique is going to be a bit of a spoiler, so if you want to read the book, you might want to skip this paragraph and the next. One of the things that I just couldn’t make sense of was the war that was happening in the background. By the end of the book, we discover that the war going on between Windsong and Candara is actually fabricated. The king and queen of Windsong stage battles on the other side of planet Windsong and broadcast upsetting “updates” on the war to make people hate Candara. However, the vast majority of Candarans aren’t fighting in the war, they’re on Candara, which is on the other side of the solar system at all times. What is actually happening is a certain group of people pretends to be Candarans, or Exiles, and fight real battles against the Windsong military, which continues to suffer major losses in the “war.” Windsong’s military willingly admits that their weapons are inferior to Exile weapons, and Essie discovers why — it’s because Windsong weapons are designed to be non-lethal against the staged Exile army, even though the staged Exiles have actual, lethal, deadly weapons that are killing, maiming, and destroying Windsong military and Windsong citizens. Once all these pieces fell into place, I still couldn’t figure out the point of the war. If the king and queen actually wanted Candarans dead, why weren’t they fighting real Candarans? If the purpose of the war was to keep people loyal to a king that seemed to be “protecting” them in the war, why was the king killing his own citizens in the military? If they had to stage battles, why not use non-lethal weapons on both sides and tamper with the footage? Altogether, the war plotline felt shoddy and barely thought through.
Another spoiler, so be warned, but I also thought Olivia was a weak villain. Most of the book had Essie struggling more with her own desire to run, rather than fight, and struggling to find strength and power where she felt she had none, and I thought all of that was good. But the main villain was still Olivia, and I hoped for more out of encounters with her. Despite Olivia trying to kill Essie three different times, in three different ways, when we finally discover Olivia’s reasoning behind it all in a single scene where Essie and Olivia finally face off against one another, the reasons boil down to “one Candaran murdered my parents,” a thread that was never explored before or after Olivia’s admission of this fact, and that Olivia blamed Essie for the king’s excessively predatory interest in Essie. That’s right, Olivia blamed Essie as both a child and a teenager for Essie’s own father’s sexually predatory actions. If that detail of Olivia victim-blaming Essie was an attempt to make me dislike Olivia more, it worked, but as a murder motive, especially so late in the story, it felt both gross and weak. I guess I just expected a more complex motive out of Olivia, who has a history of some surprisingly clever and well-executed political machinations.
Final Thoughts
Though some of plot threads were weak and some of the sci-fi elements felt a little less than unique, Stitching Snow still made for a nice afternoon read. Picking up a sci-fi space adventure after several rounds of fantasy-style retellings was a nice breather for me. I absolutely fell in love with Dimwit, despite that I didn’t always agree with his portrayal or how Essie and Dane sometimes interacted with him, and Essie and Dane eventually made a pretty awesome team when they started working together. Stitching Snow has a lot in it to make it a good read, especially if you don’t take it too seriously or think too critically, butI’m an English major so I always read critically. But you guys probably knew that by now. Ultimately, I couldn’t exactly reconcile the problems I saw in the story, which is it why the score is just below a solid 4 out of 5.
Still, it’s a fun read and hopefully, if you skipped the spoilers in the critiques section, you’ll pick it up to read for yourself. For those that did read the spoilers, don’t worry. I still left a lot of cool stuff out so you won’t be spoiled for that.
I’m interested in reading Lewis’ other fairy tale retelling, Spinning Starlight, but I don’t own it yet. It’s a “Wild Swans” retelling, which is a story I absolutely love, but it’ll have to wait. Check back in two weeks to see what else I’ve been reading. As always, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments, and if you have any good book recommendations, let me know!