Review: The Raven and the Reindeer, by T. Kingfisher

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Sat May 13 17:10:41 PDT 2017


The Raven and the Reindeer
by T. Kingfisher

Publisher: Red Wombat Tea Company
Copyright: 2016
ASIN:      B01BKTT73A
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     191

  Once upon a time, there was a boy born with frost in his eyes and
  frost in his heart.

  There are a hundred stories about why this happens. Some of them are
  close to true. Most of them are merely there to absolve the rest of
  us of blame.

  It happens. Sometimes it's no one's fault.

Kay is the boy with frost in his heart. Gerta grew up next door. They
were inseparable as children, playing together on cold winter days.
Gerta was in love with Kay for as long as she could remember. Kay, on
the other hand, was, well, kind of a jerk.

  There are not many stories about this sort of thing. There ought to
  be more. Perhaps if there were, the Gertas of the world would learn
  to recognize it.

  Perhaps not. It is hard to see a story when you are standing in the
  middle of it.

Then, one night, Kay is kidnapped in the middle of the night by the
Snow Queen while Gerta watches, helpless. She's convinced that she's
dreaming, but when she wakes up, Kay is indeed gone, and eventually the
villagers stop the search. But Gerta has defined herself around Kay her
whole life, so she sets off, determined to find him, totally unprepared
for the journey but filled with enough stubborn, practical persistence
to overcome a surprising number of obstacles.

Depending on your past reading experience (and cultural consumption in
general), there are two things that may be immediately obvious from
this beginning. First, it's written by Ursula Vernon, under her T.
Kingfisher pseudonym that she uses for more adult fiction. No one else
has quite that same turn of phrase, or writes protagonists with quite
the same sort of overwhelmed but stubborn determination. Second, it's a
retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen."

I knew the first, obviously. I was completely oblivious to the second,
having never read "The Snow Queen," or anything else by Andersen for
that matter. I haven't even seen Frozen. I therefore can't comment in
too much detail on the parallels and divergences between Kingfisher's
telling and Andersen's (although you can read the original to compare
if you want) other than some research on Wikipedia. As you might be
able to tell from the quote above, though, Kingfisher is rather less
impressed by the idea of childhood true love than Andersen was. This is
not the sort of story in which the protagonist rescues the captive boy
through the power of pure love. It's something quite a bit more
complicated and interesting: a coming-of-age story for Gerta, in which
her innocence is much less valuable than her fundamental decency,
empathy, and courage, and in which her motives for her journey change
as the journey proceeds. It helps that Kingfisher's world is populated
by less idealized characters, many of whom are neither wholly bad nor
wholly good, but who think of themselves as basically decent and try to
do vaguely the right thing. Although sometimes they need some
reminding.

The story does feature a talking raven. (Most certainly not a crow.)
His name is the Sound of Mouse Bones Crunching Under the Hooves of God.
He's quite possibly the best part.

Gerta does not rescue Kay through the power of pure love. But there is
love here, of a sort that Gerta wasn't expecting at all, and of a sort
that Andersen never had in mind when he wrote the original. There's
also some beautifully-described shapeshifting, delightful old women,
and otters. (Also, I find the boy who appears at the very end of the
story utterly fascinating, with all his implied parallel story and the
implicit recognition that the world does not revolve around Kay and
Greta.) But I think my favorite part is how clearly different Greta is
at the end of her journey than at the beginning, how subtly Kingfisher
makes that happen through the course of the story, and how understated
but just right her actions are at the very end.

This is really excellent stuff. The next time you're feeling in the
mood for a retold and modernized fairy tale, I recommend it.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2017-05-13

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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