This version of the classic fairy tale was retold by Amy Ehrlich and illustrated by Susan Jeffers.
Perhaps obviously, I was inspired to read The Snow Queen after watching Frozen, which was loosely based on this story.
Certainly I can see how Frozen was seeded by ideas from The Snow Queen. In this book, there is a brief mention of trolls, a child's heart is frozen by being pierced by a sliver of a broken mirror (in the movie, a child's heart is frozen by being pierced by ice), there is a Snow Queen, there's a reindeer, and in the end, someone is saved by someone else's love.
That's pretty much where the similarities end, though. In The Snow Queen, a young girl named Gerda leaves in search of her childhood friend Kai, who was lured away from home by the Snow Queen, and she has lots of adventures along the way. It's kind of rambling, and maybe her search even comes across as kind of a quest. She encounters more than one old woman who knows magic, but luckily none of them are evil. She crashes the honeymoon of a princess and her new prince, she runs into a band of robbers in a forest, and she teams up with a friendly reindeer.
Happily, the story ends well, and it had all sorts of elements that made it fairy tale-ish: magic, talking animals, flower gardens, something of a lesson in stranger danger. I guess I didn't give it a higher rating mostly because the title character remained a mystery. She wasn't exactly good - she did basically kidnap Kai - but she wasn't exactly evil, either. Who was she, really? Also, the young robber girl confused me, too. She wanted to play with Gerda, and she ultimately helped her on her mission, yet she liked to see animals suffer, and she threatened to kill Gerda herself. I just didn't get her.
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