Insta Review: Snow White, by Matt Phelan

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I was expecting a graphic novel retelling of the classic fairy tale, but what I found instead was a smoky, film noir adaptation with a 30’s flair. Samantha White, lovingly called Snow, is just a young girl when she loses her mother and her father remarries. Her stepmother is a glamorous starlet with expensive taste and a serious evil side who immediately sends her to boarding school. After her father’s “mysterious” death, there’s only one thing standing between that evil stepmother and her late husband’s fortune – Snow. With the magic mirror reimagined as an eerie stock ticker and the seven dwarves showing up in the form of seven tough street kids, the story has been updated and urbanized enough to be interesting. I think that most of my students that pick up this more mature Snow White don't really know what they're getting; I don't know that kids know the background story well enough to pick up the subtle changes (Snow White isn't currently Disney’s most popular princess, after all). While the more popular graphic novels get hoarded for weeks on end, this one is normally returned within a day or two. A miss with my students, but Snow White is more likely to be appreciated by its target, more adult, audience.

A post shared by Ms. Fitz (she/her) (@fitzbetweentheshelves) on Sep 17, 2017 at 1:10pm PDT