Ice

Mixed feelings. Well written retelling of East of the sun, west of the moon. With a little Beauty and the Beast and the tale of Psyche and Cupid for good measure. Cassie has grown up in an arctic research station. Her father says her mother is dead,. Her grandmother tells her what she thinks is a fairy tale about her mother being the daughter of the north wind, who is captive of the trolls, who made a deal with the polar bear king to save infant Cassie and her father. On her 18th birthday, the polar bear kings comes for her.
What I don't like is how she makes a deal with him, to be his bride and have children (he can become human) if he'll save her mother, then plans how she can welsh on the deal later.. How she ends up falling in love with him. The relationship isn't well developed-you see him giving her things, being patient, ect.. When she leaves her home to move in with him, she snags 'a month's worth of birth control pills an assistant left behind'. She gets pregnant anyway, because Bear 'cures' her of the chemical imbalance. Which she discovers when she wonders why she is throwing up three months later! Now, it gives readers the impression that she is protected from the day she takes the first pill, and it doesn't explain why she thinks she's safe for months after only having a month's supply!
Anyway, the arctic descriptions are very well done, the strength and determination Cassie shows when she must rescue her husband, pregnant and alone, to the land east of the sun, west of the moon is great. The writing is well done over all, despite the flaws. ( )

I’ve been looking for THE re-telling of “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” for awhile now. I’m afraid I’ll have to keep looking. I liked a lot of what Durst did with this story, and Cassie was a really interesting rendition of the heroine. But her journey at the end just lost me completely. [Jan. 2011] ( )

Cassie Dasent is growing up in an Arctic research station with her dad and his team. Her grandmother has always told Cassie stories about her mom and how the family lost her to the North Wind and the Polar Bear King. When Cassie was younger, she believed these stories, but as she's grown older, she hears them as a metaphor for her mother's death.

Until she meets the Polar Bear King.

Cassie has a chance to save her mother. All she has to do is marry the King. Can she be that brave for a woman she doesn't even remember?

I enjoyed the way that this fairy tale has such a very scientific background. I forget sometimes, but I did earn my biology degree back in the day, so to have that mixed in with a fairy tale was absolutely perfect for me. Don't get all weirded out by that. There's nothing difficult to understand (I promise), it's just that Cassie has been trained as a scientist all her life and suddenly she's in the middle of a fairy tale. I liked seeing her adapt to that and shift her world view. I also liked the way that her training made Bear's job easier. Now that I think about it, having the book set in the modern world makes me feel like magic can be around any corner. And isn't that nice to think about?

I liked Cassie as a heroine because she was feisty and because she took this changing world in stride. She knew what she wanted to do and she went for it. Absolutely nothing stood in her way.

I even liked Bear and how much he cared about his duties. There is one scene that really bothered my latent feminist tendencies though. I understand where he's coming from, but it really, really bothered me.

I really liked this take on "East of the Sun, West of the Moon." I've also read Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow by Jessica Day George, and I have to say that I prefer Ice. I always do better with characters I can relate to and understand, and Cassie did that for me. I liked the twists the story took. I did guess what was going to happen at the end, but not until I was already in the middle of the big climax.

My one real complaint is that the book just stopped. Things are technically resolved, but I do like some sort of epilogue or afterward, and I didn't get that here.

I do recommend this for fans of fairy tale retellings. It's an enjoyable take on the original tale with a likeable heroine as well.

Cross-posted to my book blog, The Introverted Reader ( )

Really liked this book! :D ( )

I did read this in a sitting and it kept my interest, however it did leave me feeling that that there wasn't enough there for me to recommend it. Normally this sort of thing would make me very happy but the romance wasn't there. It just didn't come across as real, it came across as if she was almost doing the quest out of some sort of token-filling, and while she was in peril during it, and the being pregnant situation does reflect earlier myths and a lot of her travails are hard work they don't seem to really affect her in a serious way, or in a way that made me feel she was in real peril or under real stress.

I didn't think I'd say this about many books, but it needed more romance. For an example of how a romance slowly unfolds I suggest Beauty by Robin McKinley which also has some of the same themes built in. ( )