"It is possible with enough time and imagination to break your own heart"
Stealing Snow is a retelling of the classic fairytale The Snow Queen. It begins in an asylum in New York City where troubled teenagers are held for their own safety because they each hold a belief that they are somehow magical. One girl believes that she can fly, a boy has an obsession with fire, while our main protagonist was confined because she walked through a mirror trying to get into Wonderland. Her name is Snow and this is the tale of her dysfunctional family.
When Snow's best friend is kidnapped she escapes through a wall to rescue him and finds herself in one of the magical worlds her therapist has been telling her don't exist. As you would expect from a Snow Queen retelling, this is a world of ice, snow and northern lights, but less predictably it is also a world of pink penguins and flying dresses; a world where the snow itself is magic, a commodity to be used by the heroes and abused by the power hungry. In this book even the golems and familiars are made of snow.
As Snow chases after her friend on a rescue mission, she meets many familiar characters such as Gerda and Kia, and the Little Robber Girl, but they are none of them what they seem and Snow has to try and identify who she can trust in this world that makes no sense to her and yet which feels like a part of her soul. Here she meets a Snow King, a Fire Queen, a River Witch and a flirty lad name Jagger who promises to be her guide.
Snow wrestles with her new feelings for Jagger which she thinks are a betrayal of her friend Bale and a distraction from her mission. It is a lesson in seizing the romance that is before you, rather than holding onto dreams of a lost love.
As she learns more about her past she discovers that she has powers of her own that she must learn to control in preparation for the final snowy battle that will determine who the next monarch is to be.
Stealing Snow is a lovely little book that is full of wintry magic and while it can be a bit predictable at times, it is still a festive fireside read for December.
Enjoy!
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