Snow White and the Seven Samurai

I did not bother finishing this book. I did not actually get bored but did not see the point. The jokes kept coming but the wit was standing still and it was all bound to end in just another punchline. Holt tries to cram into one book the same sort of fun that Douglas Adams would spread over three and the result looks, well, cramped and inelegant. I'm afraid this book failed to convince me that it's made of something more spontaneous and attractive than painstakingly contrived absurdity.

A twisted fairy tale in which the Evil Queen's magic mirror is hacked by 3 teens, causing the coputer system that controls the narrative of Fairyland to crash. The computer jokes in this do not age well, I doubt any young people even know what Dos is, let alone remember the early days of lots of crashes, eccentric commands and slooow operating speeds.

A nostalgia re-read 3/18/2025

Copy of my Launchpad review from 2001:
The comfortable world of Fairy Tales (hey, I am a hero; I get the girl and the gold so it is comfortable for me!) has started to glitch. The Dwarves are still short, but are now Japanese. The Wicked Wolf is going through a bad chapter of his life.
Another of Tom Holt’s gentle twists on accepted tales. Not as funny as his early works, but still a joy.

I liked this a little more than some of the other [a:Tom Holt|9766|Tom Holt|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1246502762p2/9766.jpg] books. The ending is kind of a let down but it is consistently pretty funny throughout.

An interesting plot premise but the action got a bit confusing, fairy tales as virtual reality

I did not get into this book right away. But after a couple of chapters the fairy tale & computer mix hooked me.

Word games, sure. Deeper meaning or interesting story? Nope.