The Snow Queen

October 3, 1994
Lynch (Melisande; The Steadfast Tin Soldier) brings exquisite grace and elegance to his illustrations of Andersen's classic story of the power of love to heal even the most hardened and icy heart. The design is impressive: delicate black lines frame the four columns on each spread while the art varies not only in placement and size but also in style. A Victorian garland of flowers circling the text of Gerda's prayer is juxtaposed with an Andrew Wyeth-like panel depicting the snow falling on Kay's sleeve, while the wicked goblins and their distorting mirror recall Rackham or even Hogarth. Lynch sometimes departs from the text with intriguing results. For example, the Snow Queen's guards, described by Andersen as ``great ugly porcupines, others like snakes rolled into knots with their heads peering out, and others like little fat bears with bristling hair,'' are pictured as splintered icy dragons or gargoyles under attack from triumphant golden angels in Roman armor. Retold from the original English version by Caroline Peachy, this narrative omits some of the excursions found in the original, but Lynch's Snow Queen remains a dazzling and irresistible enchantress. Ages 6-10.

October 4, 1993
Lewis's commanding translation of this Andersen classic rings with nobility even as it maintains a colloquial jauntiness. The famously gripping narrative, of tender-hearted Gerda's epic quest to rescue her friend Kay from the frozen realm of the Snow Queen, is respectfully and insightfully introduced by Lewis. She points out, for example, that, of all of Andersen's major tales, The Snow Queen is ``the most free from ill fortune, sorrow, unkind chance'' and that its protagonists ``make their own luck, good or bad, as they go''; and that it is the ``only great classic fairy tale in which every positive character is a girl or woman . . . while the victim to be rescued is a boy.'' Barrett (see review of Beware Beware , above) contributes gentle watercolor and pencil illustrations, evoking an ageless fairy-tale realm while a frisson of danger lingers beneath her flower-filled images. Pictures of icy wastes--a flurry of blue, white and violet--are especially striking. Inset illustrations and incidental art as well as full- and double-page pictures are interspersed throughout the very substantial text in an agreeable book design that accommodates the youngest members of the target audience. Ages 4-up.