Customer Reviews

Snow White and the Seven Samurai

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For some reason Tom Holt has never gotten the attention that Terry Pratchett does. They are both comic geniuses, both very solid, imaginative writers, and both manage to be incredibly prolific. Possibly, it is because Pratchett has chosen to set his stories in Discworld, with a regular cast of characters, and Holt starts from scratch each time. But, without question, you can't go wrong with either one. Providing you like to laugh, that is.

Somehow three little hackers (disguised as three colorblind mice) slip into the castle of the Wicked Queen and come upon her just as she is running Mirrors 3.1 on her magic mirror. They watch as she runs 'Who_is_fairest.exe and sets an appointment in her calendar for doing away with Snow White. As the queen slips off the hackers attempt to take control of the operating system. No surprise, the pest control software works and the Queen returns in what is almost the nick of time. Unfortunately, the female of the three mice turns the mirror off rather than shutting it down. In this world, Mirrors 3.1 is the real operating system, and it doesn't take well to sudden power losses.

In fact, it scrambles everything in memory - which is everything. The Wicked Queen quickly grabs her backup memory bucket (think of it as a 'wet' drive), and heads off into the magic forest to find someone who knows how to pour a full system reload. And so begins the ultimate fractured fairy tale. In it, you will discover that the Three Pigs have resorted to building with concrete and anti-tank weapons. You will meet the wolf that huffs, puffs and says 'rivet.' And find out that Snow White is fond of bondage. You will even get to wonder 'What are these seven samurai doing in a dwarf tale.'

What you won't get to do is sit there, read with a grim expression, and not even utter a snicker. Tom Holt is a wizard at the quickly set up, awful pun ("two wrongs don't make us Wrights" and "good fencers make bad neighbors." He has a knack for literary sight gags and the sublimely ridiculous. His books are meant for those times when all the bits refuse to fit together and you just need to think about something else. Or when you want to get somewhat hysterical for a few hours. While this isn't Holt's very best effort (try 'Expecting Someone Taller' or 'Flying Dutch') it is, like all of his work, way better than any of the competition except Pratchett.

I'm not really a fantasy kind of person. But after reading this book, maybe I ought to shift preferences after all. This book is hilarious, funny. It's corny, easily understood by adolescents. His description and the way the whole story just spins around had my brain churning up mental images. Already I've drawn a sketch of the wicked queen. The Big Bad Wolf and his consort the elf is next on the list. Who knows, maybe the whole cast would make an appearance in my sketch book. Every one is entitled to their own opinions. This book, in my opinion, is a perfect read to cheer oneself up when they're days away from major examinations. Stress-reliever. Read it and if you fall outta your chair as I did during Physics, then it's good.

This is my first shot at Tom Holt's work, and I have to say that "Snow White and the Seven Samurai" certainly entertained and delivered on the promised laughs. Also, having an interest in Japanese literature, Holt got my curiosity going in how the heck one can put the Seven Samurai and Snow White in the same story. He did. Rather well, I might add.

In the fantasy dream dimension where so many creatures we all know and love live, 3 teen hackers manage to crash the Wicked Queen's MIrrors 3.1 system. This plunges the whole dimension into chaos, with the Big Bag Wolf changing into frogs, and other things. The Three Little Pigs end up with nothing to do, and Snow White turns out to be a scammer who is taking the Seven Samurai for a ride. This is in addition to the rest of the zany people and creatures one finds in Holt's world.

Holt is a great writer with a gift for great descriptions and puns. Greatly enjoyed the sardonic wit of many of the characters, such as the Wicked Queen, Dumpy the Dwarf and Julian, Desmond and Eugene, (the 3 Little Pigs). There was a lot of humour, and while most was of the "sniggering" variety, there were occassions when tears came to the eyes.

For comic fantasy, and that being an unknown quantity for me, I was impressed with this book from Tom Holt. I will certainly be looking into more of his work.

Snow White and the Seven Samurai starts out with a great premise--all your favorite fairy tales get mixed around--but then does not deliver. There are a lot of characters in the book who do not act like their tales are mixed up. You expect them to be the opposite of the way they are in the real tale, but instead they fall somewhere in between. Characters are added that have nothing to do with fairy tales. While there are some truly clever and funny parts, all in all the book is kind of a hodgepodge of fairy tales and mixed up fairy tales and just regular fiction-writing. For true Holt humor, stick with Expecting Someone Taller or Flying Dutchman.

Good stories stay good, even when told a different way. In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," for example, we have the fantastical realm, the powerful but fallible beings who transform others, and of course, the ones transformed. And, the steady stream of hilarious asides.

Okay, Holt isn't Shakespeare, but he does a good job with the same story elements. Yes, we wake up at the end and find that it was all a dream, or something like that, except that some people don't wake up and just dream on.

Not heavy reading, by any means, but it does a nice job filling the gap between Pratchett's releases.

OK, many of Mr. Holt's books are hard to follow, this one was perhaps even a little harder due to the parallel stories. I really did like the idea of a Mirrors computer operating system though :-)

I won't get into the plot because others have already touched on it. I will say, it's an okay read but don't expect anything that you'll be wanting to tell all your friends about. There are many interesting ideas in the book and it starts off well enough - but the conclusion feels contrived, even trite. It felt like Holt either wrote himself into a corner or got bored of working on the book.

I still recommend it if you enjoy fairy tales with a new spin on them, but there are other books that have done the same thing better.

Bought this book just outside Sir Walter Scott's tower in Edinburgh as a travel book. Though I made it to the end, I consider that a major accomplishment that I survived the effort.

I loved fantasy books, but this book caused considerable agony to read. And I'm at pains to describe just why. Mr Holt is a highly skilled writer so I can't put it down to the work of a bad writer.

I want to say it's because the book violates its internal logic. By that I mean that any novel that works has a framework of rules that it follows. This book seems to take the tack that anything can happen as it's just a story. In doing that, I felt I had no ledge to rest on.

Holt definitely isn't a writer for me. I'd run in fear if anyone tried to push another of his books in my hands. However, I acknowledge the skill of the writer and am sure he has an audience as long as they can be find with an anything goes environment.

I have read several of Holt's book prior to reading this (Nothing But Blue Skies, Wish You Were Here, Odds and Gods, and Little People) but this has to be his best. It has just so much going on that you can only read this in small doses. It is just so clever. And funny. Don't forget funny. This guy must be fun to chat with after a few drinks. He just goes here and there and is always looking to make any situation funny. C'mon, Mirrors instead of Windows computer program, Snow White an actual dominatrix type, and don't forget the 3 little pigs. The Big Bad Wolf. Rumplestiltskin. Jack and Jill. Humpty Dumpty. The 3 blind mice. No one is sacred and left alone. The brothers Grimm visiting this land to steal stories, he just covers almost every well known children's story and just has fun with it. I had just as much fun reading this, maybe more. I have bought 2 or 3 copies and given them as gifts. I want others to find humor and laugh like I did. I want whoever is reading this to do the same.

There are some of Tom Holt's books that are comic genius. These include Flying Dutch, Who's Afraid of Beowulf, and Expecting Someone Taller. Other books of his I found more dissapointing as they tried too hard to be funny (especially after paying the U.S. price of a British import). These titles include Ye Gods, Overtime and Djinn Rummy. I came across Snow White on a recent trip to Britain. Snow White falls somewhere between great and mediocre. This book takes most of the Grimm's fairy tales, adds some fantasty-folklore and a crashed computer to make one of the oddest casts of characters I've read before. Holt takes his usual jabs at our computer driven society, throws in some virtual reality and identity issues but this book is meant to be read as a comic novel. There are some very funny segments involving the Big Bad Wolf's identity crisis and Holt's writing style always has some good one-liners. However, for the most part this book isn't laugh aloud. I would recommend it if you are big Tom Holt fan but if you've never read anything of his start with the three books I named at the begining of this review.