Stitching Snow by R.C. Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Princess Snow is missing.
Her home planet is filled with violence and corruption at the hands of King Matthias and his wife as they attempt to punish her captors. The king will stop at nothing to get his beloved daughter back—but that’s assuming she wants to return at all.
Essie has grown used to being cold. Temperatures on the planet Thanda are always sub-zero, and she fills her days with coding and repairs for the seven loyal drones that run the local mines.
When a mysterious young man named Dane crash-lands near her home, Essie agrees to help the pilot repair his ship. But soon she realizes that Dane’s arrival was far from accidental, and she’s pulled into the heart of a war she’s risked everything to avoid. With the galaxy’s future—and her own—in jeopardy, Essie must choose who to trust in a fiery fight for survival.
Warnings: attempted sexual assault, parental abuse, childhood sexual assault, death by fire, murder
Stitching Snow is a futuristic space opera retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but with a plucky heroine who doesn’t go down without a fight. Essie has been living on a cold mining planet called Thanda, far away from the politics of her home planet, Windsong, and Garam, another desert planet. (By the way, I can’t believe it took someone pointing it out for me to realize that the names Thanda and Garam are from the Hindi words for cold and hot, respectively. I am so ashamed!) Now obviously, you know she is the lost princess Snow, so we will skip ahead to when a Garamite guy comes exploding through the sky, kidnaps her and tries to take her back in the hopes of using her in hostage negotiations. She obviously wants no part in this and fights him every step of the way, but her appearance is quite distinctive and like it or not, she soon gets pulled back into that world.
Essie has to face old demons, particularly the step-mother who is out for her head (but on the down low , like in public she is very happy to see her again), and because of whom she was hiding out in that cold mining planet in the first place. However, thanks to frequently getting into cage fights, being a badass stitcher (her term for the machinery manipulation she does) and her latent skills as an Exile (thanks to her spy mother), she is able to hold her own place. However, there is not one villain in this story, there are two – her father is alive, and though he doesn’t want her dead, he is still a terrible king, awful human and trash father (look at the warnings). With the childhood she had, you can’t really fault her for trying to escape and not caring for the consequences of her disappearance. But when she finally joins the rebellion against her father as a spy, she does so to take responsibility and remove a tyrant from the throne.
Dane is a mostly superfluous love interest – their romance is a slow development from kidnapper-kidnapee (which I still don’t forgive him for), to shaky allies, to him pining away for her, and finally them getting together in a happily ever after. Anyway, he is not necessary, as there is no enchanted sleep exactly to wake her from. However, there are other allusions to the original story with seven robots replacing the seven dwarfs (Curser was my favorite, obviously!), a poisoned ruby necklace that looks like an apple, the evil stepmother, the royal guard who lets her go. Speaking of royal guards, the story even has the princess-royal guard trope thrown in for good measure when Dane poses as the member of her guard to be by her side during her mission. The ending ends on a HEA, and it is good. Overall, a well-written retelling of Snow White, but it is darker than you expect.
Received an advance reader copy in exchange for a fair review from Disney Hyperion, via Netgalley.
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