At the risk of repeating myself yet again, picture books are for everyone. They are most certainly appropriate for young adults, especially when they are bold, daring, and splashed with a bit of danger. Published by Enchanted Lion Books‘ new picture book imprint Unruly, You Can’t Kill Snow White is both a new interpretation and a faithful retelling of the old fairy tale. Named to the 2023 Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated Young Adult Book Prize Shortlist, this French import is by turns haunting, suspenseful, and surprising.

Written and illustrated by Italian-born artist Beatrice Alemagna, You Can’t Kill Snow White is narrated by the queen, she of the magic mirror and an all-consuming obsession with being the most beautiful. Many of the other familiar elements of the fairy tale as it is commonly told are also present: there is the widowed king, his dead wife, and their child Snow White, with lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow, and hair like “a mane of ebony, as sparkling as a starry night.”

Also included are the huntsman, the seven dwarves, and the queen’s repeated attempts on Snow White’s life, culminating in the poisoned apple that finally fells the young woman. Snow White, of course, reawakens and leaves her glass coffin to marry the prince in a lavish wedding ceremony, with one crucial detail straight from the Brothers Grimm story. Arriving at the wedding, the queen is given a pair of coal-heated shoes in which she must dance, “spinning and swooning” to her death.

This is normally the point in the story where we say “and they all lived happily ever after,” but readers of the traditionally fairy tale stories know there is plenty of horror, gore, and mystery in them. You Can’t Kill Snow White lies squarely in this tradition. Alemagna’s illustrations are almost surreal in their execution, and demand that the reader spend time with them to truly understand them. They don’t give up their secrets easily.

While there is not much text in the story (eighteen pages total in a 96 page book, presented in two-page spans intercut with four pages of illustrations), the translation by Karin Snelson and Emilie Robert Wong is marked by rich vocabulary and metaphor. Again, one should be prepared to spend time with this book, and to read it more than once. That is no chore, however. This is the kind of art that stays with you, in all its discomfiting glory.

This edition by Enchanted Lion Books is rather oversized, a little over 9×13″ (23x33cm). The unusual Swiss binding allows the book to lay flat when open, giving the reader unfettered access to its contents. It makes for a very attractive volume that would be fitting as a gift for fans of horror or fantasy literature.

The jealous and murderous queen at the heart of You Can’t Kill Snow White is a complex figure. Yes, I may have just summarily described her as “jealous and murderous” but there is real pathos and pain in her story as Beatrice Alemagna presents it. She has been “dreaming of love since she was a child,” but instead of enacting that love in the world, she is consumed by what she doesn’t have. One, dare I say it, almost feels sorry for her. But this is what the best of literature does: it forces one to reexamine previously held assumptions and to hold things in tension, to sit in a new ambiguity.

Title: You Can’t Kill Snow White

Written and illustrated by Beatrice Alemagna

Translated from French by Karin Snelson and Emilie Robert Wong

Unruly, an imprint of Enchanted Lion Books, 2022

Originally published as Adieu Blanche-Neige, 2021, Editions La Partie,

Awards: Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated Young Adult Book Prize Shortlist, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-59270-381-4

You can purchase this book here.*

Find this book at a library.

Reviews: Kirkus, School Library Journal, The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Booklist

*Book purchases made via our affiliate link may earn GLLI a small commission at no cost to you.

Klem-Marí Cajigas has been with Nashville Public Library since 2012, after more than a decade of academic training in Religious Studies and Ministry. As the Family Literacy Coordinator for Bringing Books to Life!, Nashville Public Library’s award-winning early literacy outreach program, she delivers family literacy workshops to a diverse range of local communities. In recognition of her work, she was named a 2021 Library Journal “Mover and Shaker.” Born in Puerto Rico, Klem-Marí is bilingual, bicultural, and proudly Boricua.