STITCHING SNOW by RC LEWIS
A REVIEW by ALEXA DUNCAN
Stitching Snow by RC Lewis is something you might not fully get at first glance. There’s snow and apples on the cover, sure, but then it’s like, okay, what is this book? Surprise, it’s a Snow White retelling set in space. Think Cinder by Marissa Meyer because these books came around around the same time. See, YA publishing went through a phase in 2011-2015 or so where it published a ton of fairy tale retellings, and Stitching Snow is no exception.
Meet Essie, our Snow White character. She lives on the frozen world of Thanda with seven droids (dwarfs) and prefers to keep to herself, fighting for money and making repairs to mining equipment with the help of her droids. Things change when a mysterious boy crash lands ne
ar her hut. This boy is named Dane, and Essie reluctantly agrees to help him fix his ship and get off planet. What follows is a brand new retelling of the Snow White story we all know, with a sci-fi twist.
The thing about Stitching Snow is that I didn’t dislike it. I liked it well enough. but as a retelling I found it a bit confusing. It takes the story a long time to catch up with the Snow White elements, and there was a long chunk of story wherein I forgot it was a retelling in the first place. The retelling elements don’t really come into play until about halfway through the book, and when they did come in, I was a little confused, like, wait? This is a Snow White retelling? Indeed it is.
Essie is a fun character. I like all the cage fighting elements even if her fighting skills and lack of explanation of how she learned them bugged me a little. She’s a little stereotypical of 2015 YA–“oh, like a girl can’t do it?”–but it didn’t pull me out of the story. Dane is also an okay character. He doesn’t do a whole lot to advance the plot but he’s there/ My favorite characters were the droids, interestingly enough. They’re all fun and I loved the voices the audiobook narrator did for them.
The book is well written, though it does have a trope that I HATE in sci-fi novels, aka using made up words as curses. Frack, unhinged, sparkling, etc. They just get annoying after a while.
Despite my grumps, Stitching Snow is a fun YA sci-fi for people who don’t usually read sci-fi. The retelling aspects may be a little confusing, but once you get past them, you’ll find yourself in for a fun ride.