[Happy birthday, Dad!]

I honestly thought I hadn’t read this book before; it was still in my head as ‘a book I need to read’, so when I found an inexpensive paperback copy, I grabbed it PDQ. Then, of course, I read the first twenty pages and thought, “This sounds awfully familiar.” I guess I did read it, or at least the first part of it, at one point a few years ago, but luckily I didn’t remember every single part of it. Edith Pattou is American; an Ohioan, to be precise (like me!); she has written two other YA books and one picture book. I don’t see that the third book in the YA trilogy ever got published, which is unfortunate.

(Ebba) Rose is the last of eight children; her mother is superstitious about birth direction, so all eight children were born facing different points on the compass rose. Rose, however, was not the east-born child they told her she was; she was actually a north-born, but her mother does not want to believe it because of a prophecy. The prophecy said that a north-born child of hers would die covered in ice and snow after a long journey. When Rose was old enough to make her own decisions, the family had a good deal of misfortune. Their (rented) farm was sold out from under them; an older daughter, Sara, became ill as well. However, a white bear (polar bear) comes and says that if Rose comes to live with him, their troubles will be ended. Rose’s mother is certain this will lead to her death, but the bear promises her safety. So Rose goes. Will she be safe? And why does the bear want her to live with him?

The story is told from the point of view of Rose, her father, her next-older brother Neddy, the white bear, and the Troll Queen. Chapters are fairly short, in most cases (Rose’s are the longest) and there are a lot of them; in the paperback version, it’s nearly 500 pages. Because of the many chapters, though, it’s a quick read. The many changes in point of view are not jarring, actually; it isn’t so much because the characters are that similar, but mostly because after the first 50 pages or so, they start fitting together like pieces in a puzzle, or facets of a gem (or some other hackneyed cliche). It’s a fairy tale retelling: the story “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”, which I didn’t hear as a child and had never read as an adult. It’s apparently a Scandinavian tale, specifically Norwegian. The story is set in Norway, and, as we find out in the afterword, in a specific time: the sixteenth century.

Rose is spunky, of course, but mostly just very determined. Her extraordinary skill is weaving; she practices so much that she weaves incredibly quickly and incredibly well. I don’t know enough about weaving to know if what she does is possible, but it doesn’t seem to matter. This is a fairy tale retelling, after all. Her siblings are mostly flat, but Neddy is not. He starts out trying to write poetry as an adolescent and eventually grows into being a steady, intellectual young man. He gets a job, towards the end, with a scholar, working on a history of Njord and Danemark, in a monastery, and it suits him perfectly. The other characters I really enjoyed included a young troll named Tuki, Rose’s parents, and the white bear himself.

It’s a book strangely grounded in reality, for all that it is a fairy tale. Rose gets cold. She needs a good deal of supplies to make it on her trip. A ship captain, later on, is only decent at captaining when he’s sober (which he rarely is). Rose and her family are very practical, of course, being farming types; while in the castle with the white bear, Rose ends up washing her own clothing, to stay grounded. I mean, there’s still an ice bridge and trolls and a talking white bear, of course. However, the story balances itself very well. Overall, I’d recommend it to fairy-tale-retelling fans, as well as people who enjoy Scandinavian-derived fantasy, and overall solid works of YA literature. 4.5/5 stars.