book review of the snow queen

A Summary and Analysis of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’ Fairy Tale

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Hans Christian Andersen’s influence on the fairy tale genre was profound. Although ‘The Snow Queen’, ‘ The Emperor’s New Clothes ’, ‘ The Little Mermaid ’, and ‘ The Ugly Duckling ’ have the ring of timeless fairy stories, they were all original tales written by the Danish storyteller in the mid-nineteenth century.

First published in 1844, ‘The Snow Queen’ (divided into seven parts) is perhaps the most celebrated of all of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. But what does this story mean? You can read ‘The Snow Queen’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis.

‘The Snow Queen’: summary

First, let’s begin with a brief plot summary of ‘The Snow Queen’. A hobgoblin has created a mirror which magnifies ugly and evil things, and shrinks good and pretty things. When hobgoblin’s associates took the mirror up into the sky to see what the angels looked like in it, it fell and smashed into millions of pieces.

Some of these pieces got into people’s eyes and distorted their view of the world; some pieces became windows; some pieces even made it into people’s hearts and turned those hearts as cold as ice. But many pieces were left scattered about the world.

Two small children – a boy, named Kay, and a girl, named Gerda – live as neighbours and love each other as if they were brother and sister. But one day, the Snow Queen appears outside Kay’s house and shortly after that, a piece of the hobgoblin’s magic mirror gets caught in his eye and reaches his heart, turning it to ice. Thereafter, he starts to behave badly towards Gerda and can only see the ugliness in things.

Kay takes his sledge into town, where the Snow Queen appears to him again and takes him under her wing, and they ride off on her sledge together. Gerda wonders what happened to Kay, fearing him dead. She throws her prized red shoes into the river as an offering, in the hope that Kay will come back in return.

But it doesn’t work, so Gerda gets in a boat and soon drifts out into the world beyond her home, where she meets an old lady who befriends her. Gerda talks to the flowers in the woman’s garden, in the hope that they will tell her where Kay is, but they speak to her in riddles.

Autumn comes, and Gerda continues on her way in the world. She meets a crow, who tells her that Kay is in the palace of a princess. But when Gerda travels to the palace, the prince is not Kay, although his appearance is similar. The prince and princess give Gerda a coach and warm coat, so she can continue her journey.

However, Gerda is captured by robbers, and taken to their castle. There she meets a little robber girl, whose doves tell Gerda that Kay was taken by the Snow Queen to her palace further north. The robber girl helps to free Gerda from the castle.

With the help of a reindeer, a Lapp woman (from Lapland) and a Finn woman (from Finland), Gerda travels north to the colder parts of Scandinavia, until she reaches the palace of the Snow Queen, where the Snow Queen has Kay under her spell. The only way to free him from it is to remove the shard of the magic mirror that has turned his heart to ice. Kay is nearly blue with cold, and it’s only the Snow Queen’s attention to him that keeps him from freezing.

The Snow Queen flies away to warmer countries, deserting Kay. Gerda turns up and recognises Kay instantly despite his changed appearance, but he sits still and cold and unresponsive. Upset, Gerda cries warm tears that drop onto the frozen Kay, and seep through to his heart, thawing it.

When Gerda sings a song they both know, he recognises her, and bursts into tears. His tears wash out the grain of glass from the magic mirror that was lodged in his eye, and he returns to his old self. Reunited, Gerda and Kay return home, growing up together and yet retaining their childlike innocence, as spring turns into summer.

‘The Snow Queen’: analysis

‘The Snow Queen’ is, fundamentally, a story about good and evil. But what is most noteworthy about this fairy tale – perhaps even more so than in Andersen’s other major fairy tales – is that the evil character at the centre of the story, namely the Snow Queen herself, doesn’t get her comeuppance at the end of the tale. Nor does the hobgoblin who created the mirror which allows Kay to be transformed in the first place.

One of the reasons why Andersen’s fairy stories have endured, perhaps, is that they have decidedly bittersweet ‘fairy-tale endings’: the good may end happily, but the bad don’t necessarily end unhappily. The Snow Queen isn’t heard of again after she flies off to warmer climes, abandoning poor Kay.

Of course, the mirror and the ice are loaded with symbolism and significance in the story. The mirror represents unhealthy cynicism which destroys youthful innocence: it’s significant that, when Kay becomes ‘infected’ with the grain of glass from the magic mirror, he wants to go off and play with the older boys, suggesting that wide-eyed wonder and childhood innocence are being replaced by surly adolescence, which involves disrespecting the kindly grandmother who reads stories to him and Gerda, and neglecting Gerda herself.

But the glass doesn’t infect everyone: Gerda is able to retain her innocence even as she grows up, as is Kay once he is saved by Gerda. By the same token, Kay’s cynicism isn’t his own fault: it’s just his rotten luck that the grain of the mirror gets caught in his eye.

This suggests that a person’s individual circumstances shape their views and their personalities, and that they aren’t necessarily to ‘blame’ for how they behave. But they can be cured of it, if they are shown love by their friends and those close to them.

This, of course, is what the tears that Gerda sheds over the frozen body of Kay represent. They spring from genuine sadness that she has lost him, and their warmth is enough to thaw his icy heart and bring him back.

Here, the gender roles are noteworthy: unlike ‘ Sleeping Beauty ’ or ‘ Snow White ’, it’s not a male character saving and waking a female character, but a heroine who rescues her male friend from the stasis (death?) he has been condemned to by the evil witch character (i.e. the Snow Queen).

But what does love triumph over in ‘The Snow Queen’? ‘Cold reason’ might be one answer. When Kay is ‘infected’ by the grain of glass from the magic mirror, he does lose the ability to see the beauty in everything around him. But seeing a worm in the rose when there is one isn’t nasty cynicism: it’s just realism.

The problem stems from losing all appreciation of the rose’s beauty, but blind romanticism and idealism are just as flawed (and arguably, just as dangerous). Nor is there anything wrong with being fond of maths (another ‘skill’ Kay picks up following his encounter with the mote of glass).

Yet this isn’t how Andersen intends to analyse or scrutinise his tale: he clearly was a Romantic who was unhappy with the way the world really was and felt that love and beauty should triumph over intellectualism and rationalism.

If the ultimate message of the fairy tale, when reduced to its core elements, is trite (love and beauty triumph over scientism and realism; love, if you will, conquers all), and if that message even rings a little hollow to those of us who have spent a little time in the ‘real world’, then such flaws are easily swept away by the captivating beauty of the tale itself, with its use of icy landscapes, clear and powerful symbolism (the mirror, the tears, the snow and ice itself), and refusal to follow the ‘prince + peasant girl = marriage’ formula beloved of many writers of fairy tales.

‘The Snow Queen’ is often regarded as a precursor to, and major influence on, the 2013 hit animated film Frozen . But although the film followed Andersen’s tale in the early stages of the movie’s development, the two narratives and characters ended up being very different.

Nevertheless, the influence of ‘The Snow Queen’ can be seen in many works of children’s literature: the Snow Queen’s temptation of Kay almost certainly influenced C. S. Lewis, whose White Witch similarly tempts Edmund away from the other children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . (Both Andersen’s Snow Queen and Lewis’s White Witch appear arrive into a snowy world and wear an inviting warm fur coat.)

And Lyra’s voyage to the frozen north to find her male friend and brother-in-all-but name, Roger, in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights echoes the journey that Gerda makes in Andersen’s fairy tale. Both Lyra and Gerda convince adults to help them in their quest through being kind and generous, so others feel compelled to help them in their pure quest to find their friend.

Curiously, and by way of conclusion, it’s worth noting a bit of biographical interest. Andersen may have been inspired to create the figure of the Snow Queen after the noted Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, with whom Andersen became infatuated, rejected his advances.

Andersen became Kay, the innocent boy who was ‘led on’ by the beautiful and bewitching, but ultimately cold, Snow Queen who reels the hapless boy in only to desert him once she has stolen his heart.

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6 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’ Fairy Tale”

This was always one of my favourite stories. Thank you for the excellent analysis here.

It’s so multi-layered, isn’t it? Thanks for the comment – it was fun analysing this one :)

Fabulous analysis.

Thanks, Lynn!

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Books of The Times

Two Brothers in the Icy Grip of Midlife

By Michiko Kakutani

• April 27, 2014
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Michael Cunningham’s resonant new novel, “The Snow Queen,” takes its title from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name about the redemptive powers of love and its ability to melt even the chilliest of hearts.

Unlike his acclaimed 1998 novel, “The Hours,” which worked a series of inventive variations on Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” however, this latest book has only the most tangential relationship to the Andersen tale. (The hit Disney movie “Frozen” hews considerably closer to the original.) Mr. Cunningham’s “Snow Queen” takes little more than its central theme and wintry imagery from the original fable to create a contemporary story about familial and romantic love — love lost and found.

The result is arguably Mr. Cunningham’s most original and emotionally piercing book to date. It’s a novel that does not rely heavily on literary allusions and echoes for its power — a story that showcases the author’s strengths as a writer and few of his liabilities, while creating a potent portrait of two brothers and their urgent midlife yearning to find some sense of purpose and belonging.

Triads and triptychs seem to exert a special hold over Mr. Cunningham’s imagination: “ The Hours ” and “ Specimen Days ” (2005) both featured three stories linked by shared themes and motifs; and the stories in “Specimen Days,” like the novels “ A Home at the End of the World ” (1990) and “ By Nightfall ” (2010), pivoted around three central characters. The same is true of “The Snow Queen,” which focuses on the lives of a 38-year-old man named Barrett, who works in a vintage clothing store and who has just been dumped by his latest boyfriend; his older brother, Tyler, a musician with little to no following, and a secret drug habit; and Tyler’s ailing girlfriend, Beth, who has received a diagnosis of Stage 4 cancer. Around this three orbit a motley, sometimes shifting group of friends, lovers and colleagues, who together form a small Brooklyn solar system that Mr. Cunningham charts with sympathy, humor and psychological precision.

The novel begins with Barrett having a vision — or a mystical experience — in Central Park one snowy evening in 2004: At first he thinks it’s a “freakish southerly appearance of the aurora borealis,” then it seems like something more metaphysical, like “the eye of God” looking down at him. After Googling “every possible malady (torn retina, brain tumor, epilepsy, psychotic break) that’s presaged by a vision of light,” he starts brooding over its meaning. Has he become one of those people who see U.F.O.’s and apparitions? Has the experience somehow changed him? Does it portend something good or ill? He decides not to tell his brother about what he’s seen: He “isn’t ready for Tyler’s skepticism, or his valiant efforts at belief. He’s really and truly not ready for Tyler to be worried about him.”

As in earlier Cunningham novels, there is something faintly incestuous about the relationship among Barrett, Tyler and Beth; the down-and-out Barrett has moved in with his brother and had been helping care for the gravely ill Beth — they were her attendants; they were Team Beth. Tyler adores Beth, and Barrett feels much the same way, “though he does so because Tyler does.” Later, when Beth begins to make a seemingly miraculous recovery that may or may not be lasting, Barrett will wonder if his vision — his close encounter with whatever — somehow played a role in her dramatic turnaround.

The brothers have been close since their mother’s sudden death (golf, lightning) years ago. These motherless boys, so gifted in their youth, have become middle-aged without ever quite finding their vocations or making a go of their talents. Barrett, “who’d seemed for so long to be the magical child,” developed an array of “languid capabilities (he can recite more than a hundred poems; he knows enough about Western philosophy to do a lecture series, should anyone ask him to”), but never “the ability to choose, and persist.” Tyler, blessed with “athletic ease” and a “singular gift for music” as a boy, has become, at 43, “an unknown musician,” tending his dying girlfriend in a dingy apartment with slanting floors in the depths of ungentrified Bushwick.

There are fewer patches here of the self-conscious, purple prose that bogged down earlier novels like “ Flesh and Blood ” and “Specimen Days.” Mr. Cunningham seems to have harnessed his more sentimental inclinations, and instead of piling poetic phrases one on top of another to evoke his characters’ predicaments, he artfully allows the reader direct access to their hearts and minds by using his gift for empathy and his own brand of stream of consciousness (enhanced perhaps by his study of Woolf in writing “The Hours”). He gracefully delineates Tyler and Barrett’s family history, the often different ways the brothers have processed their common past, and the shared and withheld secrets that have defined their fraternal bond over the years.

At the same time, Mr. Cunningham provides an impressionistic portrait of Brooklyn, circa 2004, and the East Village, some four years later, as America shifts gears from the George W. Bush era to the “change election” of 2008. These snapshots attest to his ability to give us an intimate sense of his characters’ daily lives, while situating their hopes and dreams within the context of two moments in history already slipping by.

THE SNOW QUEEN

By Michael Cunningham

258 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $26.

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Books | Review: ‘The Snow Queen’ by Michael Cunningham

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Only the intercession of the Snow Queen can break the spell, thawing hearts grown immune to goodness and beauty, restoring humanity.

This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members with the Sunday Chicago Tribune and by digital edition via email. Click here to learn about joining Printers Row.

Michael Cunningham’s “The Snow Queen” is a loose riff on Andersen’s tale, set in modern-day New York City. His characters are likable people with good hearts, who sometimes make questionable decisions.

The story opens as 38-year-old Barrett Meeks walks home through Central Park, on a dark winter’s evening. Suddenly, a strangely beautiful blue-green “celestial light” appears in the sky directly above him, accompanied by the sensation that an omniscient being has entered his soul. Stunned, he watches as the light disappears, as abruptly as it arrived.

Uncertain the event happened at all, he distrusts his senses. Normal people don’t have supernatural experiences; that’s for the tabloids and bad cable TV. Barrett is a stable, if romantically challenged, man whose worst fault lies in repeatedly loving and losing the same type of impossibly youthful and vapid lover. The fear of others perceiving him as some sort of New Age convert keeps him from sharing the experience, even when holding it inside feels painfully lonely. “What, then,” Cunningham writes, “if that celestial eye opened specifically for Barrett — was the annunciation? What exactly did the light want him to go forth and do ?”

Barrett and his brother Tyler share an apartment with Tyler’s fiancée, Beth. Dying from incurable cancer, Beth is a pale, ethereal creature who — on a dramatic whim of Cunningham’s — dresses only in white. The symbolism between herself and the Snow Queen in the fairy tale is anything but subtle; added to her diaphanous portrait is the suggestion she possesses an otherworldly wisdom, an acceptance of her illness and inevitable fate. Cunningham writes, “(S)he’d been dying for quite some time. … (I)t had become so inevitable as to feel like a home of sorts.”

In preparation for their wedding, Tyler works to compose the perfect song to perform for Beth. It consumes him, to the point he begins losing faith in his talent. The theme of Tyler’s song, another homage to the fairy tale, is the image of Beth the queen sitting upon a throne of ice, beautiful yet unreachable, slowly moving away from him.

To walk the frozen halls at night

To find you on your throne of ice.

In the midst of his frustration, Tyler wakes one morning to find their bedroom window open, wind pelting the floor with snow. Stretching outside, something lodges in his eye, perhaps a snowflake or piece of grit, something he can’t remove. Once he’s closed the window and padded into the kitchen, the image of ice shards haunt him. Going back through the few lyrics he’s written, he’s unsure how this new idea will fit, yet he knows the song is incomplete without it. And yet, as he tries again, the song rings false.

The shards of insecurity and perfectionism have been planted in Tyler, and he is lost in gnawing fear that he will fail his lover. He can’t write, the wedding date is closing in, and his Snow Queen is dying.

Cunningham’s overarching theme begs the question if we, as human beings, can be held responsible for our own blunderings, or if we’re being nudged along by an unseen force we don’t understand. If some celestial force is leading us, are our flaws our own? And are we in need of saving by some external act of grace? In “The Snow Queen,” Cunningham has set up the questions; from here it’s up to us to find our own answers.

Lisa Guidarini is a freelance writer and librarian living in the Chicago suburbs.

“The Snow Queen”

By Michael Cunningham, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 258 pages, $26

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Review:  In ‘The Snow Queen,’ Michael Cunningham wrestles with life

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While wandering through Central Park after getting dumped by his latest romantic fixation, Barrett Meeks, the aimless 38-year-old gay protagonist of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, “The Snow Queen,” has what seems to be, even to his proudly secular mind, a mystical experience: “There it was. A pale aqua light, translucent, a swatch of veil, star-high, no, lower than the stars, but high, higher than a spaceship hovering about the treetops.”

Because this scene is set in fall 2004, just before the election that will give George W. Bush a second presidential term, Barrett doesn’t rip out his smartphone and search Twitter for drone sightings. He does check the evening news when he gets home to the Brooklyn apartment he shares with his older brother, Tyler, and Tyler’s seriously ill girlfriend, Beth. But his Twilight Zone encounter hasn’t hit the news cycle.

What exactly happened to Barrett? “The sky regarded him, noted him, closed its eye again, and returned to what were, as Barrett can only imagine, more revelatory, incandescent, galaxy-wheeling dreams.” His fear is that the incident was “nothing, a blip, an accidental glimpse behind a celestial curtain, just one of those things.” But even if this is some kind of divine text message, how will Barrett, an underemployed Yale grad who spends most of his free time pondering either his rotten luck with men or his inability to stay interested in an occupation longer than a few months, ever unlock its meaning?

A yearning for the transcendent runs throughout Cunningham’s fiction. His characters always seem to be seeking a portal in the everyday for a glimpse at the eternal. Think of Clarissa, from Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel, “The Hours,” running errands through Greenwich Village in the same meditative manner of her strolling London predecessor from Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” keenly alert to the “crush and heave” of the “endless life” encompassing her.

A better comparison might be with New York art dealer Peter Harris from Cunningham’s 2010 novel, “By Nightfall,” which centers on a character who, like his author, is conscious of “the unending effort to find a balance between sentiment and irony, between beauty and rigor,” in the quest to “open a crack in the substance of the world through which mortal truth might shine.”

Although its characters have a habit of relating tales that make life seem stranger than fiction, “The Snow Queen” resembles “By Nightfall” in its desire to provide urbane literary entertainment without too much stress or strain over form. Big questions are nonetheless posed on this compact canvas, in which spiritual mystery is set beside related Dionysian subjects such as artistic creation, drug use and, of course sex (of a not especially satisfying variety, it must be said).

Writing about such matters is a tricky proposition. Cunningham largely avoids the traps of new age mumbo jumbo and sentimentality through a commendable display of negative capability, the fancy Keatsian term for a thinker’s capacity for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

“The Snow Queen” is a novel that keeps ironically pointing out the inability of characters to predict the future, yet it remains compassionate toward the human need to impose provisional narrative order on the random flux of life. Barrett, suddenly “prone to Signs of Significance,” can’t help wondering if Beth’s cancer remission is somehow related to the light he saw in Central Park. (Yes, he’s a bit of a narcissist, like most everyone in this novel of aging bohemians desperate to unmire themselves in their middle years.)

Tyler, feverishly at work on a wedding song for his beloved that will at once express the depth of his feelings and fulfill the promise of his artistic gifts as a composer, is seeking control through creativity and falling steadily into addiction.

More a collection of traits — fading good looks, benevolent masculinity, frustrated creative ambition — Tyler is mostly seen in symbiotic relation to Barrett, who seems willing to sacrifice worldly achievement for the possibility of a complementary love. Their childhood is sketched in a manner that can seem a little too thematically convenient. (Barrett and Tyler’s mother was killed by lightning, giving them an early lesson in the baffling yet suggestive code of the universe.)

What Cunningham does get right is the way an addict’s life becomes a tissue of rationalized lies. Admirable too is the way he shows that even the closest of brothers, bunking together in not-quite-gentrified Bushwick in the shadow of a loved one’s illness, can remain something of a mystery to each other. Barrett will grow furious upon discovering that Tyler is still using, but Tyler will feel equally indignant that Barrett kept from him the strange vision that he related to others far less close to him.

The plot of “The Snow Queen” depends a good deal on discoveries about the past and the fateful turns of the future. The choices characters make are consequential, but individual agency can get lost in the bend of time. This gives the book a curious tempo. The first part proceeds slowly with finely detailed descriptions while the final section, set four years later, gallops forward with a soap opera-ish slew of surprises and reversals.

This is an odd work, engaging in parts and shot through with stunning lyricism, yet testing in the problematic personalities it brings together. The resolution Cunningham bestows is not unlike that otherworldly light in Central Park — subject to interpretation and dependent to an unusual degree on a character’s capacity to hold on to hope.

The Snow Queen A novel

Michael Cunningham Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 258 pp., $26

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the snow queen.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Snow Queen,” a goblin creates a looking glass that distorts all that is virtuous and beautiful, making everything reflected in it appear low and ugly. After seeing how effectively it works, the goblin hatches a scheme to bring the looking glass to heaven to mock the angels with it. Instead, when the glass is shattered in its ascent, the shards that fall scatter everywhere, spreading misery to everyone. When a miniscule splinter lands in someone’s eye, his vision is instantly jaundiced and his view of life dimmed.

The characters at the heart of Michael Cunningham’s latest novel, THE SNOW QUEEN, are plagued by the distorting slivers of middle age, and the reckoning with the past, present and future that such a daunting fact of life can suddenly demand.

"Throughout the book, Cunningham portrays in a convincing, organic style the symbiotic nature of his characters’ relationships, the ways in which friends grow to become surrogate family members while siblings grow into surrogate parents."

In the book’s opening, Barrett Meeks --- 38 years old, gay, a prodigal son who has amounted to little --- has recently been dumped via a cold five-line text when he sees a light in the night sky over Central Park. The light seems to apprehend Barrett in the way he imagines “a whale might apprehend a swimmer, with a grave and regal and utterly unfrightened curiosity.” The vision shakes him to his core, but he keeps it to himself as he heads back to Bushwick where he lives with his brother, Tyler, a talented musician (with a hidden drug problem) who has failed to meet with any success, and Tyler’s bride-to-be, Beth, who co-owns a clothing shop. Beth is dying of cancer, and Tyler spends his days doing drugs, looking after Beth and trying to write the perfect song for her for their wedding. All of this is set against the backdrop of George W. Bush’s presidential re-election in 2004, and Cunningham skillfully uses it as a harbinger of stolen dreams and the failure of hope.

With his primary characters and their relationships established, Cunningham jumps ahead two years to New Year’s Eve, 2006. Beth’s cancer has miraculously retreated. Though grateful to still be alive, she feels a growing discontent and is haunted by a lack of purpose in what she’s doing with the gift of her second life. Meanwhile, without the role of caretaker to lend shape to his days, Tyler has fallen deeper into his drifting mode of existence while continuing his drug habit. And Barrett is still seeing a man named Sam, a nice enough guy, but not the stuff of great, romantic love.

Throughout the book, Cunningham portrays in a convincing, organic style the symbiotic nature of his characters’ relationships, the ways in which friends grow to become surrogate family members while siblings grow into surrogate parents. Whether working in short (at times too abrupt) chapters, as in the book’s opening, or later, in longer, more richly developed scenes, he illustrates the dense interconnectedness of lives lived in overlapping proximity, as well as the deeper psychic links that motivate and inform those lives. His prose is clause-laden, at times building toward satisfying peaks, at times merely piling up detail and crushing a fine point with redundancies. But for a book that hardly can be described as plot-driven, the style is well matched to the story.

If there’s a vexing problem, it’s that Cunningham seems to like his characters too much, as if he were afraid to harm them or make them suffer unduly. The breakups and deaths, the hurts, embarrassments and sober realizations that come in the book’s latter half happen offstage, or get neutralized in the relative safety of a character’s mind. As a result, most of what drama there is in THE SNOW QUEEN feels muffled beneath the folds of all that carefully constructed prose --- softened to inconvenience where it could have been heightened to a threat. While it doesn’t exactly ruin the book, it disappointingly diminishes what could have been a much better one.

Reviewed by Damian Van Denburgh on May 9, 2014

The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham

• Publication Date: May 5, 2015
• Genres: Fiction , Gay & Lesbian , Literary Fiction
• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Picador
• ISBN-10: 1250067723
• ISBN-13: 9781250067722

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The Snow Queen

by Michael Cunningham

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• Literary Fiction
• New England, USA
• New York State
• Contemporary
• Mid-Life Onwards
• Dealing with Loss
• Religious or Spiritual Themes

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This complex novel evaluates family dynamics and love in their myriad manifestations.

Michael Cunningham's provocative book, The Snow Queen , shares the same title as the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about good and evil but veers far from the classic story. Within a contemporary context, his novel explores the gray areas between the two extremes: the vicissitudes of ordinary existence that capriciously elevate or deplete the human soul. Cunningham is the author of many novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours , published in 1998, and By Nightfall , released in 2010. The Snow Queen explores similar themes from these earlier works: brotherhood, marriage, middle age, gay and straight relationships, and caring for a dying loved one. The novel also fully possesses his distinctive style that matured after his poignant 1990 debut A Home at the End of the World . In this most recent offering, Cunningham's prose is meticulously crafted. His ruminations about relationships — their messiness and their seemingly small but magnificent joys — are astonishingly insightful. His honesty can be wrenching, yet his compassion and humor are plentiful (as are his parenthetical remarks, by now familiar to his fans). Imbued throughout with wintery details, the novel opens on a cold November night in 2004. Thirty-eight-year-old Barrett Meeks is walking alone, "crunching over ice-coated silver-gray snow" through Central Park, when he looks up and sees a celestial light, pale aqua in color, what he thinks, at first, must be a "freakish southerly appearance of the aurora borealis." Whether the translucent light — which appears to him four days after he's been dumped, via text message, by his boyfriend — is merely "a blip...just one of those things," or something more significant in meaning, sets this questing family story on its mysterious, and ultimately revelatory, course. Early on we learn that Barrett lives in Brooklyn, in the "placidly impoverished neighborhood" of Bushwick (see ' Beyond the Book ') with his 43-year-old brother, Tyler, and Beth, his fiancée. Beth is dying of cancer, has lost her hair from chemo, and resembles Andersen's Snow Queen only by her manner of dress — all white — when she's strong enough to venture outside. Beth seems, at first, to be one of Cunningham's most sympathetic and simple characters to date. She bakes. She has fashion sense. She's an avid reader. She's "kind to just about everyone" and, despite her cancer diagnosis, insists "on living in the most generous and abundant possible world." With time, however, her disease — being "marveled at" — causes her to change, to doubt herself, in unexpected ways. Tyler, meanwhile, is a struggling musician and vitriolic liberal whose nickname, "Mister No Fun," inspires within him simultaneous embarrassment and pride. He also uses cocaine, which provides for him the "sting of livingness" as he lovingly cares for Beth, who remains unaware of his addiction. For a while at least, so does Barrett, a Yale grad with a "capacious and quirky mind," whose post-graduation years were spent driving around the country, working menial jobs, and floundering in a myriad other ways. After losing his apartment and lacking funds for a new one, he's ended up with Tyler and Beth. Though he loves and dotes on his brother, Tyler reveals too, his opinion that Barrett has become "another of New York's just-barelies," who lacks "the ability to choose, and persist." Mid-life, Barrett is working retail, selling unique but semi-affordable objects and garments like "paper-thin leathers" and "jewel-dusted scarves." In his downtime, he rereads Madame Bovary , his favorite novel. Similar to his previous works, Cunningham masterfully articulates the painful truths about the complexities of love shared between or among friends, lovers, and families. About Beth, for instance, whom Barrett adores, he admits to himself "a terrible thing." He finds sometimes he wants Beth either to recover or die because the phases in between — "the endless waiting, the uncertainty," as well as the barrage of doctors, mainly "upsettingly young" who "purely and simply, don't know what's going to work" — are excruciating to bear. Though Cunningham's narrative is deeply affecting in many sections, the book tends to lack a strong cohesion. In a few too many places, questionable choices — particularly with storylines involving a larger cast beyond Barrett, Tyler, and Beth — distract from the novel's more compelling elements. Also disconcerting, at times, is Cunningham's inclusion of theological questions and themes, which serve mainly as set-ups for clever but limited dialogue rather than resonant contemplations. At its core, however, The Snow Queen is about searching: for clarity, miracles, faith, love, and meaningful work. Despite some flaws, the book is a sensitively rendered story in which significance, even hope, might be found in a stunning night sky yet also may be present closer to home, just waiting to be discovered.

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‘The Snow Queen’ by Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham lifts the everyday into something miraculous so often he is more poet than novelist.

A woman buys flowers in "The Hours" and enters a garden of sensation. In "Specimen Days," Whitman's genius arises from the clanging streets of Brooklyn.

In his new novel, "The Snow Queen," Cunningham reverses direction of this aesthetic aviation. Here the miraculous returns to earth in sentences so gorgeous that we can barely feel the wheels touch down.

"The Snow Queen" begins with the most dramatic of all such landings. Walking home from the dentist, tooth-sick and love-lorn, Barrett Meeks spots an aqua-blue smear across the night sky.

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At first, he thinks it may just be an unusually southern display of the Northern lights. But then he feels the sky looking at him.

"No. Not looking," Cunningham writes. " Apprehending . As he imagined a whale might apprehend a swimmer, with a grave and regal and utterly unfrightened curiosity."

This spiritual revelation arrives in the nick of time for Barrett. Once a boy genius and wandering Yale graduate, he's eddied into a life of reduced expectations.

As the book opens, Barrett works in retail and lives with his brother, Tyler, a struggling coke-addicted musician who is trying to compose a wedding song for his dying love, Beth.

Cunningham has worked well with trios in previous novels, and he makes the most of this set up here. "The Snow Queen" moves in propulsive bursts, shifting from Barrett's to Tyler's to, briefly, Beth's point of view, showing how secrets, by their nature, metastasize and create alternate realities.

Barrett doesn't tell his brother about his celestial revelation; Tyler is hiding his cocaine use from both Beth and Barrett; and Beth, so ill and frail, remains a mystery to everyone. Her entire inner life is a secret.

Cunningham's opening set piece unfolds at night, snow tumbling through an open window in the apartment Barrett and Tyler and Beth share in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The book moves in this mode throughout as it skips across a decade, the atmosphere magical, but gritty, like a modern-day fairy tale.

The book, in fact, takes its title from a Hans Christian Andersen story in which a troll creates a mirror that magnifies the ugly qualities of whoever stands before it. The devil takes the mirror to heaven, but it falls, scattering splinters into people's hearts and eyes.

In Andersen's story, these splinters drive a little boy and girl, Kai and Gerda, apart. A Snow Queen seduces Kai and gives him the power to forget Gerda. The only way Gerda can earn his love back is to remove the splinter from his heart.

As Cunningham has done in "The Hours" and "Specimen Days" with the work of Virignia Woolf and Walt Whitman, respectively, "The Snow Queen" uses its primary text less as a map than as an optic for modern concerns.

Everyone in "The Snow Queen" has a splinter they need removed, but most don't realize the wound has been self-inflicted.

Both Tyler and Barrett, for instance, are desperate for a snow queen they can serve and worship. Barrett falls in love quickly and turns his lovers into idols.

Meanwhile, Tyler seems to have found his mythical transformative figure in Beth. Caring for her has made him a better person. But he is really in the thrall of cocaine.

Andersen, like many writers of his time, was a believer, and the original "Snow Queen" pivots with extraordinary poise upon notions of good and evil and the danger of worshipping false gods.

In Cunningham's world, however, these dichotomies have lost their currency. His characters stand starkly alone in their choices thanks to the secrets they decide to keep.

Across the novel the Iraq War rages in the background, in news reports, and flippant conversation, but the narrative focus remains on romantic and filial relationships that are tested by illness and self-abuse.

Not since William S. Burroughs's "Junky" has a novel portrayed the pleasures and costs of mid-life drug abuse so clearly. Tyler loves Beth, but he won't quit, and the sicker she gets, the more he uses. Caretakers, Cunningham potently reminds, often make allowances for themselves based on the suffering they are made to witness.

"The Snow Queen" never judges its characters' excesses, their lies. It merely creates drama from them and suspense. One turns the pages wondering whether Barrett will pursue his awakening, whether Tyler will overdose, whether Beth will survive.

For everyone in "The Snow Queen," time is running out, especially Beth. She is the only main character whose point of view Cunningham keeps at a remove. We spy it briefly, as she takes a walk on a New Year's Eve, but mostly she remains off stage.

This is a masterful performance. At a glance, "The Snow Queen" revolves around so little. A man struggles to love, another to lose, and a woman tries not to give up. It is a drama that is unfolding somewhere in Brooklyn right now. To be inside this book is to stand beneath a sun shower. It dares you not to look up.

John Freeman is the author of "How to Read a Novelist."

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The Robber Girl is back! Bryony has a special destiny, foretold in The Book of The Ancients. With her dark eyes on a handsome Roma boy, Sean, and a gypsy crown, she has a battle to win, cheating death. She must rescue Adam from the Snow Queen’s web of evil, defeating the wizard and his dark sorcery. If she fails, the evil power couple will cast a maleficent shadow of doom across the world, enslaving all children until the end of time. In this tale of romance, magic, rivalry, inheritance, and destiny, a heartwarming epic journey awaits.

My book is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's original story, "The Snow Queen."

Get your copy of THE SNOW QUEEN today

Book details, genre: .

• Inspirational

Age Level: 

The Snow Queen is an adventurous fairy tale book about how an evil snow queen manages, with the help of an ice wizard, to possess both children and teenagers, to try to fulfill her misplaced thirst for fame, wealth, and love. The queen's hidden secret is that she feels unlucky, having never found someone who could truly love her. In the book, her first victim is an innocent and fatherless teenage boy named Adam. The queen traps Adam within a kaleidoscope that the ice wizard skillfully makes for her.

• Read more about The Snow Queen review by Prizzy

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The Snow Queen Kindle Edition

• Print length 41 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Passerino
• Publication date December 25, 2020
• File size 1242 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08RBG59S5
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Passerino (December 25, 2020)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 25, 2020
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 1242 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 41 pages
• #7,751 in One-Hour Literature & Fiction Short Reads
• #14,686 in Mythology & Folk Tales (Kindle Store)
• #18,830 in Fairy Tale Fantasy (Kindle Store)

About the authors

Hans christian andersen.

Hans Christian Andersen (/ˈhɑːnz ˈkrɪstʃən ˈændərsən/; Danish: [hanˀs kʰʁæsd̥jan ˈɑnɐsn̩] ( listen); often referred to in Scandinavia as H. C. Andersen; 2 April 1805 – 4 August 1875) was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories, called eventyr in Danish or "fairy-tales" in English, express themes that transcend age and nationality.

Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well. Some of his most famous fairy tales include "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Little Mermaid", "The Nightingale", "The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling", and many more.

His stories have inspired ballets, both animated and live-action films, and plays.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Thora Hallager (1821-1884) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Patrick James Lynch (born 2 March 1962), known professionally as P. J. Lynch, is an Irish artist and illustrator of children's books. He won both the 1995 and 1997 Kate Greenaway Medals from the British Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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The Snow Queen review – bold, imaginative and richly musical

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh Young Gerda is sent on an epic quest across mythical Scotland by steam train, cross-country skis, fishing boat and unicorn in Morna Young’s version

W hen the curtain goes up on this Caledonian Snow Queen, the view is both familiar and strange. Familiar, because we recognise the austere silhouette of Edinburgh’s Castle Rock at the back of Emily James’s set, as well as the curve of the theatre’s balcony reflected back at us as if we were looking in a mirror. But strange, because the rococo flourishes of the balcony seem to be morphing into the sides of a sledge. Lizzie Powell’s lights turn them an icy turquoise. Imagination has taken a grip on this looking-glass landscape.

There is something familiar and strange too about Morna Young’s adaptation, staged by Cora Bissett in a bold, expansive and richly musical production. She follows Hans Christian Andersen’s tale in outline with the expected story of 12-year-old Gerda (Rosie Graham) whose best friend Kei (Sebastian Lim-Seet) has been captured and corrupted by the Snow Queen (Claire Dargo). But in detail, she takes a wintry route of her own.

Setting the story in the late 19 th century, when the Forth rail bridge was still a novelty, she sends Gerda on an epic quest into a mythical Scotland . Rooted and serious-minded, Graham’s Gerda draws on her love of botany and thirst for adventure to track down her friend via steam train, cross-country skis, fishing boat and the back of a unicorn.

She is helped by talking flowers in Perth, a gang of robbers in the Cairngorms, a wise man in the North Sea and a seer deep in the Highlands. There are fairies, sky warriors and a duplicitous corbie. And behind the Snow Queen is Beira, the Celtic queen of winter . Young has a rich Scots palate to match (enemies range from a “sleekit beastie” to a “crabbit hag”) and composer Finn Anderson takes it further with a set of songs that lean in to the windswept landscapes of Scottish folk.

As the children’s foe, Dargo is all the more chilling for playing the Snow Queen as halfway rational, although her ice palace seems more like an open prison than an evil lair. All the same, Gerda has ample chance to prove her mettle, making her reunion with Lim-Seet’s cello-playing Kei as warming as it is well deserved.

At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh , until 31 December

• Hans Christian Andersen
• Christmas shows

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